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New research from the University of Colorado Anschutz Department of Medicine is shedding light on how women and men with chronic kidney disease (CKD) may fare differently as they age and their disease progresses.

Among patients with end-stage kidney disease who receive hemodialysis, a treatment that filters waste and excess fluid from the blood when the kidneys can no longer function adequately, frailty and physical weakness are associated with a higher risk of cognitive impairment.

But what about patients in earlier stages of CKD who don't need dialysis yet? A paper by experts in the Division of Renal Diseases and Hypertension studied nearly 1,400 patients with mild to moderate CKD who were not on dialysis. The paper is published in the journal GeroScience.

The researchers found that although women in the study were more likely to be frail, men had a higher rate of cognitive impairment. Among men, those who were frail had more than twice the risk of developing cognitive impairment compared with men who were not frail.

Surprisingly, frailty appeared to be a bigger risk factor for men than for women. Frail men were more likely than non-frail men to show cognitive impairment over the subsequent few years, but women didn't show a similar trend.

, MS, say their work aims to identify patients at higher risk for cognitive impairment so health professionals can intervene before their condition worsens.

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