For the first time, the American Heart Association is recognizing a new condition that reflects the strong link between obesity, diabetes, and heart and kidney disease as more Americans are diagnosed with multiple chronic health problems at younger ages.
The goal of recognizing the condition – cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic syndrome, or CKM – is to get people at high risk of dying from cardiovascular disease diagnosed and treated earlier, according to a policy statement released Monday.
“Reducing the pipeline of individuals progressing to heart disease is our primary goal,” said the lead author of the advisory and an accompanying statement, Dr. Chiadi E. Ndumele, the director of obesity and cardiometabolic research in the division of cardiology at Johns Hopkins University.
Right now, “we are seeing the health consequences of all these conditions interacting and leading to earlier presentations of heart disease,” Ndumele said. Naming and describing CKM is “really a paradigm shift.”
A growing body of evidence shows how other organs in the body can be adversely affected by metabolic risk factors such as abdominal fat, high blood pressure, high cholesterol, and high blood sugar.
Dr. Pam R. Taub, a cardiologist, agreed that the new approach could be a “game changer” in how doctors treat patients.
Taub, a professor of medicine at the UC San Diego School of Medicine, said the development of new drugs to treat conditions that are part of the syndrome, such as kidney disease, diabetes and obesity, has led to a reduction in cardiovascular events and given doctors new insights into the relationship between different organs.
“It was eye-opening,” Taub said. CKM takes into account “what I call organ cross-talk, where they interact with each other in the body in a very complex way.”
In a patient’s urine sample, for example, early kidney disease can be detected. “The reason this is so important is that the drugs you can give the patient will prevent them from progressing to chronic kidney disease,” she said.
In general, Taub says, by looking at the organs together, “You can detect disease early and prevent bad cardiovascular outcomes like heart failure, heart attack and stroke.”
