Treatment
Although a cure for PKD is not available, treatment can ease the symptoms and prolong life.
- Pain: Over-the-counter pain medications, such as paracetamol (acetaminophen) can relieve pain. For most but not all cases of severe pain, surgery to shrink cysts can relieve pain in the back and flanks. However, surgery provides only temporary relief and usually does not slow the disease's progression toward kidney failure.
- Urinary tract infections: Patients with PKD tend to have frequent urinary tract infections, which can be treated with antibiotics. Early treatment is important, because infection can spread from the urinary tract to the cysts in the kidneys. Cyst infections are difficult to treat because many antibiotics do not penetrate into the cysts. However, some antibiotics are effective.
- High blood pressure: Keeping blood pressure under control can slow the effects of PKD. Lifestyle changes including low salt diet and various medications especially ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers can lower high blood pressure. Recommended target BP in these patients is 130/80 mm Hg or lower.
- Chronic Kidney Disease Progression: A very exciting new development in ADPKD treatment involves the use of Tolvaptan, a selective vasopressin antagonist, and research shows that this compound may limit cyst growth, reduce symptoms and most importantly, delay the progression of chronic kidney disease.
- End-stage renal disease: There are two options for replacing kidney functions: dialysis or transplantation. Healthy (non-PKD) kidneys transplanted into PKD patients do not develop cysts.
Read more about this topic: Autosomal Dominant Polycystic Kidney
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—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Ambivalence reaches the level of schizophrenia in our treatment of violence among the young. Parents do not encourage violence, but neither do they take up arms against the industries which encourage it. Parents hide their eyes from the books and comics, slasher films, videos and lyrics which form the texture of an adolescent culture. While all successful societies have inhibited instinct, ours encourages it. Or at least we profess ourselves powerless to interfere with it.”
—C. John Sommerville (20th century)
“James’s great gift, of course, was his ability to tell a plot in shimmering detail with such delicacy of treatment and such fine aloofness—that is, reluctance to engage in any direct grappling with what, in the play or story, had actually “taken place”Mthat his listeners often did not, in the end, know what had, to put it in another way, “gone on.””
—James Thurber (1894–1961)