Sodium Bicarbonate Found To Help People with Chronic Kidney Disease

(NaturalNews) Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a serious condition marked by the permanent loss of kidney function. When the kidneys are damaged, the organs can't remove wastes and extra water from the blood as well as they should and the result can be a host of serious and even deadly health consequences. But now researchers in the United Kingdom have made a breakthrough in the treatment of advanced CKD -- and it doesn't involve a new drug or high tech surgery. Instead, it's simply a daily dose of sodium bicarbonate or, as it is more commonly called, baking soda.

Used for everything from baking cookies and non-toxic cleaning to relieving indigestion and sunburn, now baking soda has been shown to slow the decline of kidney function in CKD, according to a study set for publication in the Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (JASN). "This cheap and simple strategy also improves patients' nutritional status, and has the potential of translating into significant economic, quality of life, and clinical outcome benefits," researcher Magdi Yaqoob, MD, of the Royal London Hospital, said in a statement to the media.

This is an enormously important finding because CKD is a growing health problem, both in the UK and the US. According to the National Institutes of Health (NIH), between1990 and 2000, the number of people with kidney failure requiring dialysis or transplantation in the US virtually doubled to 380,000. If this trend continues, around 700,000 people will have serious kidney failure by 2010.

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