There are several types of Polycystic Kidney Disease (PKD). Often, PKD refers
to a genetic or inherited disease, and a less common type of PKD occurs in
babies and children. How does this disease affect the patient?
Polycystic Kidney Disease is a progressive disease and the development of
this disorder can be divided into 5 stages. Different stages of PKD have varied
effects to patient's life.
1. Emergence stage
As a kind of genetic disease, patients may be born with the cyst, but it is
too small to be checked out before the age of 20. Therefore, for those people
who have family history of PKD, you had better go for regular check in order to
detect the disease as early as possible.
2. Growth stage
When patients are at the age of 30~40, the cyst will grow faster, and we need
to closely observe the development of disease. In this stage, western medicine
has no effective treatment and they consider that there is no need to adopt
therapeutic method to treat but only to prescribe certain medicines to remedy
various symptoms, such as high blood pressure. Actually, it's not wise to do
like this, and you need to find better treatment in Chinese medicine to slow the
growth of cyst and prevent further deterioration of your disease.
3. Tumefaction stage
Without timely measures, the cyst will grow continuously and swell after the
age of 40. If the size of cyst grows to more than 4cm or cyst ulceration occurs,
we call this stage tumefaction stage. Then you may present clinical
manifestations including back pain, proteinuria, hematuria, hypertension and so
on. Integrated Chinese and western medicine can still be used to repair the
damaged renal function and treat polycystic kidney.
4. Cyst ulceration stage
Affected by some external factors, cyst ulceration may happen due to
continuous growth of the cyst. In this case, what patient should do is to
receive prompt treatment in hospital, have a good control of infection, avoid
septicemia and repid deterioration of kidney function.
5. Uremia stage
If you progress to this stage unfortunately, you can still adopt positive
treatment of Uremia and protect the remaining renal function. For those who are
in the ultimate stage, you may have to under dialysis to sustain life.