Saudi Gazette

RIYADH — The number of kidney patients in the Kingdom is growing significantly due to the sedentary lifestyle and the unhealthy food people eat, studies show.

Saudi Gazette met with Prof. Ahmed Osama Gaber, director of Houston Methodist J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center, on the sidelines of a scientific conference on "Advancements in Kidney Transplantation", hosted by King Saud University recently.

"The practice and outcomes in Saudi Arabia are on a par with international standards. The difficulties in this field are not specific to the health sector in the Kingdom, but the entire world including the US is affected," Gaber said.

He said one of the main challenges before health sectors worldwide is keeping a safe standard of performance in rural areas and small towns. "This is difficult because the resources that have to be put in every place of the country such as laboratories and experienced expertise are so expensive that cannot be duplicated in every part," Gaber said.

The professor spoke on the significance of exchanging information and results of researches in the field. "The world has become like a small place to the extent that the exchange of knowledge happens the very moment it occurs. I believe this brings experts in this field specifically together to get to learn from each other, and that is quite necessary. Every system has invented its own solutions for its own problems and knowing what the solutions have been allows us to really exchange more information."

He talked about the new explosion of knowledge that can serve the area of kidney transplantation. "There is so much on the horizon in terms of kidney transplantation. Now there is an explosion in what we call cellular therapy, which is a therapy where cellular material is injected into a patient. This generally means intact living cells. We use healthy cells either from the donor or a third party to replace drug therapy and hopefully the patient will not need any medication. We are still in baby steps of that but that is going to be the next step in this field, God willing," said Gaber.

He said the lifespan of dialysis patients has considerably increased.

"There has been tremendous advances in the way you look at dialyses over the last 25 years. The lifespan of a dialysis patient has increased. If you look at patients getting dialysis now, you cannot even tell a lot of them are even patients. They regularly work out and go to their jobs. The question is can we get rid of dialysis," said Gaber.

The reason for an increase in the number of dialysis patients is the increase of chronic kidney diseases, which are caused by three main factors: obesity, diabetes and high blood pressure. Saudi Arabia is one of the countries that have these three conditions at epidemic levels. All of that is because of the unhealthy lifestyle," he added.

There is a strong cooperation between Houston Methodist J.C. Walter Jr. Transplant Center and a number of hospitals in the Kingdom, such as King Faisal Specialist Hospital and Research Center and King Abdullah bin Abdulaziz University Hospital. The agreements of cooperation include exchange of knowledge, training facilities for Saudi medical specialists, and cooperation on enhancing quality and safety systems.