Chronic kidney disease (CKD) affects nearly 9% of the adult population in the Netherlands, yet its greatest health threat is not necessarily progression to end-stage kidney disease—it’s the heightened risk of cardiovascular events, hospitalizations, and premature death before reaching that stage.
CKD often travels in dangerous company: type 2 diabetes (T2D) and heart failure (HF). These conditions share overlapping pathophysiological pathways—such as endothelial dysfunction, chronic inflammation, and neurohormonal activation—that accelerate both renal and cardiac decline. The result is a “cardiorenal continuum,” where each disease amplifies the other’s risks.
Understanding how often CKD coexists with these comorbidities, and how this impacts clinical outcomes, requires data that is both wide in coverage and deep in clinical detail—the kind of data that PHARMO’s linked network can uniquely provide.
Research challenge
Previous studies either oversampled specific subgroups, focused only on primary care, or actively screened for CKD, limiting representativeness.
Key gaps included:
- True national prevalence based on real-world diagnoses and laboratory values
- Understanding of multi-disease co-occurrence (CKD + T2D + HF) and their combined impact on complications
- Rich longitudinal tracking of events across care settings—notoriously difficult when data is siloed
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