Women with advanced CKD (chronic kidney disease) have high rates of all pregnancy complications which increase incrementally according to how severe their disease is. Around one in three suffers permanent additional kidney damage during or after pregnancy, and may need dialysis to survive. This is extremely challenging for a new mother and her family, and shortens life expectancy.

At the moment, there is no reliable way to work out which women with kidney disease are likely to have pregnancy-associated disease progression. Current risk estimates for progression of pregnancy-associated CKD are based on a small study including pregnancies from up to 40 years ago. They do not reflect current practice nor allow accurate individual risk prediction.

Professor Chris Farmer is now working in collaboration with Kings College, London and partners on a project developing an online calculator to predict how much kidney function women with pre-existing disease are likely to lose in pregnancy. With the UK Renal Rare Diseases registry (RaDaR) and PreKid clinic, Toronto they will use data from from around 54,000 pregnancies complicated by CKD to develop this tool.

Women with CKD face stressful conflict between preserving kidney function and having a family. Recent Patient and Public Involvement work shows that the women view prediction of pregnancy outcomes as a research priority.

The PREDICT tool will be validated externally in individual patient data from three population cohorts from the UK, Canada and Sweden. The research team are developing the predictive tool interface in partnership with patients and it will be available on the RaDaR (UK Renal Rare Diseases registry) website for clinicians and patients to use.

Start date: 01/10/2018 End date: 30/09/21
Funder: Kidney Research UK
Funding: