By analysing 33 studies involving more than 280,000 people they found that those with a glomerular filtration rate of about half the normal level, had a 43 per cent higher risk of suffering a stroke in the future. Asian people with a low filtration rate were at a higher risk than non-Asians.
The academics, led by Bruce Ovbiagele, a stroke expert at the University of California, Los Angeles, recommended that treatments to lower the risk of strokes should be given to those with poor kidney function, such as taking cholesterol-lowering drugs like statins.
The second study, by British and Icelandic researchers, found that even people with the earliest stages of kidney disease were at an increased risk of developing coronary heart disease. Their study tracked almost 17,000 people living in Iceland over a 24 year period.
The presence of chronic kidney disease could be used as a predictor of heart disease, although only a “modest” one, they found.
It provided about half as much predictive gain as did history of diabetes or about a sixth as much as did history of smoking.
British Medical Journal