Vegetarian diet may halt progression of Chronic Kidney Disease

The Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) progression is a major issue, and constitutes a leading cause of death for 1.5% of the global population. Vegetarian diet has been popular with many health benefits on both cardiovascular and kidney functioning.

A systematic review was conducted by Łukasz Świątek and team to investigate the potential impact of a vegetarian diet on kidney function in CKD patients and found to have a positive effect on Chronic kidney disease progression. The review is published in BMC Nephrology.

Researchers in the systematic review focused on randomized controlled trials (RCTs) which compared the effects of a vegetarian diet (experimental) and a standard omnivore diet (comparator) in terms of the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR) in CKD patients. Inclusion criteria was based on PICO elements, with two researchers involved in browsing the Cochrane and Pubmed search engines. The investigation was performed using the PRISMA 2020 Checklist and PRISMA 2020 flow diagram. The search terms included: ‘vegetarian diet’ AND ‘nephropathy’, ‘eGFR’, ‘albuminuria’, ‘chronic kidney disease’. Bias assessment was performed using RoB 2 tool to determine the validity of the data collected from studies.

The review found that

• A total of 346 participants were included in the current systematic review out of Four RCTs. Two largest RCTs reported an increase in eGFR following a change to a vegetarian diet (p = 0.01 and p = 0.001).

• Another two found no significant differences between the experimental and control groups, also these trials were associated with a high risk of bias in terms of missing data outcome and the randomization process.

The authors concluded that findings collected in this systematic review suggest that a vegetarian diet improves renal filtration function in CKD patients. Therefore, it seems essential to conduct further research involving the impact of the diet on the progression of CKD.

Reference: Świątek, Ł., Jeske, J., Miedziaszczyk, M. et al. The impact of a vegetarian diet on chronic kidney disease (CKD) progression – a systematic review. BMC Nephrol 24, 168 (2023). DOI: https://doi.org/10.1186/s12882-023-03233-y

Keywords: Vegetarian diet,Chronic Kidney Disease progression, nephropathy, eGFR, albuminuria, chronic kidney disease, BMC Nephrology, Cardiovascular health, Łukasz Świątek.