Original InvestigationPathogenesis and Treatment of Kidney DiseaseHerbal Therapy Is Associated With the Risk of CKD in Adults Not Using Analgesics in Taiwan
Section snippets
Study Population
NAHSIT was a complex survey with stratified multistage probability sampling.12, 13 Details of the study procedure were described in our previous study.14 Briefly, Taiwan (with ∼21 million inhabitants in 1993 to 1996) was stratified into 7 strata, and in each stratum, 3 townships were selected with the selection probability proportional to the population size of the township. Among the 7 strata, there were 9 cities (population ≥ 100,000) and 12 rural areas (population < 100,000). A total of
Demographic Characteristics by Participation
The participation rate was 52.9% (1,740 of 3,292). As listed in Table 1, there was a significantly smaller proportion of men in participants than nonparticipants. Thus, men and women were analyzed separately when there were significant interactions between sex and herbal therapy. Conversely, there were no significant differences in residence area (city versus rural area), age, smoking (pack-years), alcohol drinking (drink-years), herbal therapy, analgesic use, known hypertension, known DM, and
Discussion
This is the first demonstration on a population basis that herbal therapy is associated independently with CKD in adults who were not using analgesics. Moreover, the prevalence of CKD was as high as 9.9% in Taiwan. These findings have important epidemiological implications because Taiwan is number 1 in the world in the incidence of ESRD.3
Some of the major CKD risk factors were confirmed, whereas others were not confirmed in univariate analysis in this study. However, multivariate analyses are
Acknowledgement
NAHSIT was carried out by the Institute of Biomedical Sciences of Academia Sinica and Department of Biochemistry, College of Medicine of National Taiwan University, directed by Dr Wen-Harn Pan and Dr Po-Chao Huang. The Office of Survey Research of Academia Sinica is responsible for data distribution. The assistance provided by the institutes and aforementioned individuals is greatly appreciated. The views expressed herein are solely those of the authors.
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Originally published online as doi:10.1053/j.ajkd.2007.02.259 on March 27, 2007.
Support: This study was supported by grant no. DOH93-TD-D-113-021(2) from the Department of Health, Taiwan. Data analyzed in this article were collected by the research project Nutrition and Health Survey in Taiwan (NAHSIT) sponsored by the Department of Health in Taiwan (DOH FN8202, DOH-83-FS-41, DOH-84-FS-11, DOH-85-FS-11, DOH-86-FS-11). Potential conflicts of interest: None.