Medicines to prevent kidney damage in Diabetes

So, as I've said before, any agent that improves your blood glucose control, but also antihypertensive agents of which you would think about using things called ACE inhibitors and angiotensin receptor blockers. Now, again, there's a caveat with the Black African community in that the ACE inhibitors are not as effective and you tend to use other things such as calcium channel blockers and also thiazide diuretics, as well as the angiotensin receptor blockers. Now, it's not so important about the type of agent as it is of just getting the blood pressure under better control. Keeping down your salt intake is very important losing weight. The new kid on the block that I mentioned before were the SGLT2 inhibitors. These have been found to have both a protective effect for the kidney as well as the heart. So those are ones that we would use even at the point where their blood glucose lowering effect is not that good such as CKD stage three and also CKD stage four which we use some of them for. They have been shown to delay progress in kidney disease and often what we're trying to do is reduce the progress to the point where the patient may need dialysis because that has important effects on quality of life. If you can imagine someone having to go three times a week to have dialysis, you want to help them avoid that as much as possible.