Your kidneys are vital organs when it comes to sustaining life, just as other major organs are. They rid you body of any harmful chemicals and materials produced during the normal process of living. Think of them as filters in which your blood passes through. These filters trap the waste and send it out of your body through your urine. This filter then sends the normal contents of your blood back into your bloodstream. An additional task that your kidneys perform is that they also regulate the water and salt content in your body.



When kidney disease causes your kidneys to fail, you've got two options. Depending on the degree of failure, you will either need to have dialysis - an artificial method of filtering your blood, or receive a new kidney via a transplant. Those are your only two options, so you can clearly see how critical your kidneys are.



Incredibly, a full 50% of the people who require dialysis in the United States today are diabetics. 50%! The good news - if there is any here - is that this number is declining due to an increasing awareness of how important it is to control their blood glucose levels. More good news - the incidence of kidney disease is running at about 5% of those with type 2 diabetes, compared to around 30% with those who have type 1 diabetes. But on the flip side, the actual number of diabetics with kidney disease is about the same for both types of diabetes. This is because there are far more patients with type 2 diabetes than type 1.



If the thought of having to be hooked up to a machine for months or years while you wait for a kidney transplant isn't enough to get you to start monitoring your blood sugar level, or to continue with your treatment plan if you already have diabetes, I don't know what will!