Taking kidney health warning to city’s busiest junctions

On World Kidney Day, teams from Kauvery Hospitals, Bangalore stood at two of the city’s busiest traffic junctions, the Electronic City highway on Hosur Road and the Marathahalli Bridge stretch on the Outer Ring Road, holding awareness placards and handing kidney health screening cards to over 2,000 commuters stopped at red lights.

The message on those cards was direct: Diabetes, high BP, and frequent supplements can silently damage your kidneys. Get checked before symptoms appear. The activation was backed by findings from a large-scale health screening that Kauvery Hospitals conducted across Bangalore and its surrounding areas.

Of those screened, more than 6,600 participants, over 27 percent of the total, were found to have some form of elevated blood pressure. A significant number among them had no prior diagnosis.

In Electronic City alone, 552 of 1,980 participants screened showed elevated blood pressure readings. In Chandapura, Anekal, and Kammasandra, the pattern held. Across the board, the majority of those found to be hypertensive had walked into the camp unaware.

India is home to over 77 million people with diabetes, a large proportion of them undiagnosed, according to the Indian Council of Medical Research. The National Family Health Survey found that only 30 percent of hypertensive men and 38 percent of hypertensive women in India are on treatment.

Diabetes and hypertension together account for the majority of end-stage kidney disease cases in the country. The kidney absorbs the consequences of both conditions without producing a single symptom until the damage is well advanced. Dr. Rammohan Sripad Bhat, Director of the Institute of Nephrology at Kauvery Hospitals Electronic City, and a nephrologist with over 15 years of experience trained across institutions in India and the United Kingdom, said: “ Together, over time, these things accelerate damage that could have been caught with a simple blood and urine test. By the time kidneys make themselves heard, the window for early action has often already closed.” Dr. Krishna Kishore C, Director of the Institute of Nephrology at Kauvery Hospitals, a nephrologist with over 15 years of experience and a specialist in kidney transplantation, glomerular diseases, and community nephrology, said: “ Kidney disease is preventable in a large number of cases, but prevention requires people to know their numbers before they feel unwell.”

Dr. S. Vijayabaskaran, Executive Director of Kauvery Hospitals, said, “ Our screening data puts a number to what our doctors observe every day: the burden of undetected, untreated metabolic disease in this city is large, and the kidney is where it quietly arrives. Our commitment is to make world-class kidney care, including transplantation, accessible and affordable for patients across Bangalore and beyond. Today’s awareness drive is the front end of that commitment.”