SINGAPORE - About eight years after he was diagnosed with the penultimate stage of chronic kidney disease, Mr Jimmy Tan, 96, still exercises six times a week and makes weekly trips to Clementi Mall to meet a friend for coffee.
"I chose medication because it was not painful at all," said the retired materials assistant, who has a host of medical conditions including high cholesterol and has undergone multiple procedures, including open-heart surgery. Still, dialysis will become essential when patients suffer from a build-up of toxins in their blood as a result of kidney failure, and would die without dialysis in at most two months, said Prof Teo.
To combat the risk of kidney failure, a new drug for people with diabetic kidney disease - which is the top contributor of chronic kidney disease, forming the bulk of Singapore's dialysis cases - has also been rolled out, said Dr Kwek Jia Liang, a consultant at the department of renal medicine in the Singapore General Hospital.