Chronic Kidney Disease: This Will Stop You From Dying!

If you suffer from chronic kidney disease (CKD) you’re more vulnerable to heart attack, heart failure, stroke, and complete renal failure than others.

But a new study published in the European Journal of Preventive Cardiology reveals a simple activity that reduces your risk of these fatal events by up to 40 percent.

You can’t do too little of this activity, but you also can’t do too much of it. It has to be just right.

Scientists have understood for some time that physical activity is extremely important to prevent CKD from progressing to renal failure and to prevent serious cardiovascular events in these patients.

But a research team from Taipei Veterans General Hospital and the National Yang-Ming University in Taipei wanted to know just how much exercise CKD patients should do to prevent these outcomes.

The World Health Organization (WHO) and most national health organizations recommend 150 minutes of moderate physical activity or 75 minutes of vigorous physical activity per week. This is about 30 or 15 minutes per day, respectively, five days per week. But is this enough to keep CKD under control?

The researchers analyzed data collected from 4,508 Taiwanese CKD patients between 2004 and 2017. They had access to their medical records and their physical activity levels through a questionnaire.

They quantified their subjects’ amount of exercise in metabolic equivalents of task hours per week (MET-hour/week) and divided them into highly active, low-active, and inactive.

The MET-hour/week is a complex physiological calculation and differs from activity to activity but, roughly speaking, it is the ratio of your working metabolic rate compared with your resting metabolic rate.

For example, the MET (metabolic equivalents) of sitting still is 1 MET per hour. If you burn four times as much energy as you do when you’re sitting still, such as you do when you’re taking a brisk walk, the MET is 4 MET per hour.

The 150 minutes of moderate or 75 minutes of vigorous weekly exercise is around 8 MET hours per week, so that’s more or less what the WHO recommends.

Harvard Health estimates stair-climbing to be 4 MET per hour, strenuous hiking 6–7, rowing or kayaking 6–8, 10–16 mph cycling 6–10, running 13.5, and so on.

In this study, subjects were categorized as highly active at above 7.5, low-active between 0.1 and 7.4, and inactive at 0 MET-hours per week.

Compared with the inactive group, the highly active subjects cut their risk of all-cause mortality and major adverse cardiovascular events by approximately 40 percent and their risk of progressing to end-stage renal disease by almost 20 percent.

This means that the WHO is approximately right with their 150 weekly minutes of moderate exercise.

But the scientists also found that more than 15 MET-hours per week of exercise was not associated with a further decrease in cardiovascular events, possibly because too much exercise can cause heart rhythm disorders in people with CKD.

15 MET-hours per week is roughly 45 minutes of moderate exercise per day, so if you have CKD, you may want to top off your daily exercise at around 1 hour.

But the most important thing is to completely prevent CKD from progressing and even reversing it. Thousands of readers have done just that following the simple steps explained here…