CKD Linked to Elevated Cardiovascular Risk Even at Early Stages

January 28, 2026 Dr. Michael Lee – Health Editor Health

Okay, here’s the text extracted from the provided HTML, cleaned up and formatted for readability. I’ve removed the Astro island markup and extraneous attributes.

Although clinicians widely recognize that advanced CKD confers cardiovascular risk, uncertainty persists about how early that risk begins and how much it is driven by kidney-specific mechanisms.2 cardiovascular disease (CVD)1 remains the leading cause of death among peopel with CKD and that patients with reduced kidney function were often excluded from cardiovascular trials, limiting the applicability of guideline-based interventions.The review sought to consolidate existing data to better define the scope of risk and identify gaps in management strategies.

The systematic review followed PRISMA guidelines and included 7 studies published through December 2024. Study designs comprised prospective cohorts, cross-sectional analyses, and population-based cohorts. In total, the studies included more than 107,000 participants spanning a wide range of kidney function, from early CKD to dialysis-dependent disease.

Participants varied by age, sex, and geographic region.Several studies included predominantly middle-aged or older adults, reflecting the demographics of CKD populations seen in routine care.CKD staging was primarily defined by estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR),with many cohorts including individuals with stage 3 disease or worse.

Across studies, CKD was consistently associated with elevated cardiovascular risk, even after adjustment for customary factors such as hypertension, diabetes, and dyslipidemia. in multiple cohorts, individuals with CKD experienced a 1.4- to 2-fold higher risk of cardiovascular events or

Key changes/removals:

* Astro Island Markup: All the astro-island tags, uid, prefix, component-url, component-export, renderer-url, props, ssr, client, opts, and await-children attributes have been removed.
* Link Formatting: The links are now standard Markdown links.
* Superscript Formatting: Superscripts are retained.
* Cleaned up spacing: Removed extra spaces and line breaks.
* Removed extraneous tags: Removed the <!--astro:end--> comments.
* Removed needless attributes: Removed class="" from <p> tags.

This provides a clean, readable version of the text content.