Rajeev Raghavan, MD, Talks About the Underutilized Therapeutics in Nephrology

In the last 5 years, the progression in nephrology has gained substantial momentum with a succession of new groundbreaking studies, according to Rajeev Raghavan, MD, Internal Medicine Program Director, HCA Houston Healthcare Clinical, Professor of Medicine, University of Houston.

Raghavan spoke about case challenges in nephrology, focusing on chronic kidney disease (CKD) in one of his presentations at Pri-Med West 2022. The nephrologist also took part in an expert panel discussion on cases in diabetes alongside Tina Kaur Thethi, MD, MPH, Associate Investigator and Endocrinologist, AdventHealth Translational Research Institute.

During the conference, Raghavan shared insight on the trending topics and pressing challenges happening within the field. With the various clinical trials and drug research taking place, he said there's been a big focus on therapeutics.

In addition to addressing the issues of underdiagnosis in chronic kidney disease, Raghavan explained that a key point in his presentation was the underutilization of several medications, like ACE inhibitor ARB, that can slow the progression of chronic kidney disease.

"Less than 50% of patients with chronic kidney disease are actually prescribed one of these medications, and really they are the best medicines to treat the progression of kidney disease."

Also underutilized are the SGLT2 inhibitors and finerenone, a nonsteroidal mineralocorticoid antagonist. Both are new classes of drugs that can slow progression in patients with diabetes, as well as those without.

Eliminating racism is a challenge, but Ragavan stated that he's "very proud of the nephrology community for stepping forward." He explained that a taskforce assessed the necessary data to understand how GFR glomerular filtration rate is estimated and created a race-relation equation that avoids the need to ask patients to identify whether they're African American or not.

"I think that's a huge step forward that we're trying to really eliminate some of these biases in medicine that have been there for decades," he said.