Rajeev Raghavan, MD, Discusses Updated ADA Guidelines for Diabetic Kidney Disease

The American Diabetes Association (ADA) updates its guidelines fairly frequently which is "really incredible", Rajeev Raghavan, MD, Internal Medicine Program Director, HCA Houston Healthcare Clinical, Professor of Medicine, University of Houston, said in an interview with HCPLive.

"For example," he said, "finerenone is a very new medicine that really just got a first approval in the last year. It's already made its way to the guidelines for patients with diabetic kidney disease as a medication that should be used in patients with kidney disease."

Raghavan presented a lecture on case challenges in nephrology at Pri-Med West 2022. Also, as an expert he served on the panel discussion discussing cases in diabetes with Tina Kaur Thethi, MD, MPH, Associate Investigator and Endocrinologist, AdventHealth Translational Research Institute.

Diet and lifestyle play a primary role in disease management, especially when it comes to kidney disease, diabetic or non-diabetic, and according to Raghavan, "every single guideline will harp on that." So, when diet and lifestyle adjustments don't apply a patient's diabetes or chronic kidney disease "they might not be at that target."

"For nephrology, they may still continue to put urine above the threshold for patients with diabetes who are able to see, maybe above the recommended threshold," he said. "So, for those patients, definitely there is the need for therapeutics and we're very fortunate that we've really come a long way since just having insulin for our patients."