U.S. to improve kidney health with more transplants, home dialysis

WASHINGTON–U.S. President Donald Trump signed an executive order on Wednesday, pledging to reduce end-stage kidney disease in the country by 25 percent by 2030.

The U.S. government is required to streamline and expedite the process of kidney matching in order to help increase kidney transplants. It will consider the premarket approval of wearable or implantable artificial kidneys by the U.S. Food and Drug Administration.

One goal of the order is to double the number of available kidneys by 2030, Secretary of Health and Human Services Alex Azar said in a briefing Wednesday.

The order also proposed enabling more home dialysis, which is less expensive compared with treatment in medical centers. Trump said only 12 percent of patients on dialysis currently undergo treatments at home.

In the United States, 37 million people suffer from chronic kidney disease and more than 726,000 have end-stage kidney disease.

Nearly 100,000 Americans are waiting to receive a kidney transplant, and more than 100,000 begin dialysis each year, half of them dying within five years, according to the White House fact sheets.