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Chronic Kidney Disease |




* Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts University-New England Medical Center, Boston, Massachusetts;
Department of Medicine, Aga Khan University, Karachi, Pakistan;
Department of Internal Medicine, University of Michigan Health System, Ann Arbor, Michigan;
Department of Internal Medicine, University of Groningen, Groningen, Netherlands; || Institute di Recherche Farmacologiche "Mario Negri", Bergamo, Italy; and ¶ Department of Nephrology, University of Copenhagen, Rigshospitalet, Copenhagen, Denmark
Address correspondence to: Dr. David M. Kent, Institute for Clinical Research and Health Policy Studies, Tufts-New England Medical Center, 750 Washington Street, #63, Boston, MA 02111. Phone: 617-636-3234; Fax: 617-636-8023; dkent1{at}tufts-nemc.org
Received for publication October 2, 2006. Accepted for publication March 29, 2007.
| Abstract |
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500 mg/d, significant treatment effect was seen across all patients with a measurable outcome risk, including those at relatively low risk (1.7% annualized risk for progression). However, there was no benefit of ACEI therapy among patients with proteinuria <500 mg/d, even among higher risk patients (control outcome rate 19.7%). Patients with nondiabetic kidney disease vary considerably in their risk for disease progression, but the treatment effect of ACEI does not vary across risk strata. Patients with proteinuria <500 mg/d do not seem to benefit, even when at relatively high risk for progression. | Introduction |
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Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is a major public health problem. Data from the Third National Health and Nutrition Examination Survey (NHANES III; 1999 to 2000) suggest that approximately 12% of the US population aged
20 yr may have CKD (6). Adverse outcomes of CKD include loss of kidney function, sometimes leading to kidney failure, and cardiovascular disease (7,8).
A pooled analysis of individual patient data from 11 randomized, controlled trials (919) revealed strong and consistent effects of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors (ACEI) in slowing the progression of nondiabetic kidney disease, although the treatment effect was modified by the degree of urinary protein excretion, with benefit increasing in patients with greater proteinuria (2022). Our objective was to use a risk model to examine the variation in the risk for progression of kidney disease at baseline among patients who were included in this individual patient data meta-analysis (IPDMA) and to test whether a risk-stratified analysis demonstrates previously undiscovered variation in the treatment effect of ACEI in preventing progression of kidney disease. Our hypothesis was that many patients who are enrolled in clinical trials are at very low risk for progression even in the absence of therapy and are therefore unlikely to benefit from treatment.
| Materials and Methods |
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Assessing Heterogeneity of Outcome Risk
To assess baseline risk heterogeneity, we used a simple algorithm that has been proposed for this purpose (1). Briefly, based in part on previous modeling (2022), we developed a Cox proportional hazard model using the primary outcome (kidney disease progression) as the dependent variable and previously identified risk factors for this outcome (exclusive of ACEI therapy or treatment assignment), using patients in both the treatment and the control condition. This risk model was then used to categorize patients in the data set into equal-sized quartiles on the basis of predicted risk. In addition to computing the observed rates of the outcomes in each risk quartile, we computed the observed odds of having the event of interest (kidney disease progression) in the lowest and highest quartiles of predicted risk after 1 yr in patients who were randomly assigned to the control group. We then calculated the following heterogeneity metrics (1), based on outcomes in patients who were assigned to the control group: (1) Extreme quartile odds ratio (EQuOR): calculated as the ratio of the odds of the event in the upper quartile to the odds in the lower quartile; and (2) extreme quartile rate ratio (EQuRR): This is the rate ratio for the event of interest in the group of patients in the upper quartile of predicted risk as compared with the group of patients in the lower quartile of predicted risk estimated from a Cox model that considers only the patients of the two extreme quartiles (5).
Assessing Heterogeneity of Treatment Effect
In addition to examining the heterogeneity of the outcome risk, we tested for treatment-effect differences in high-risk versus low-risk patients by testing for an interaction between risk for progression and treatment effect, to test whether patients at high risk for progression are more or less likely to benefit than those at lower risk for progression. We did this in two ways: (1) Using the patient-specific hazard of progression (calculated by the Cox model) as a linear term, which we considered our primary analysis, and (2) using quartile of risk as an ordinal variable, as our secondary analysis.
Because a previous treatment x urinary protein excretion interaction had already been identified, indicating that ACEI therapy is more effective in patients with higher urinary protein excretion, we performed similar risk-stratified analyses on subgroups with urinary protein excretion
500 versus <500 mg/d. For each proteinuria strata, we used the same risk model that was used to stratify the overall sample, which included the degree of proteinuria as a predictor.
| Results |
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500 mg/d and treatment effect on the outcome risk (interaction P = 0.003), indicating greater benefit in those with greater proteinuria (21).
Stratification by the Presence of Proteinuria
500 mg/d
When patients were stratified by the presence or absence of urinary protein excretion
500 mg/d, outcomes remained heterogeneous even within each of these strata (Figure 2). Among patients with proteinuria above this level, the EQuRR was 19 and the EQuOR was 129. Because there were no poor outcomes among the lowest risk quartile among control patients with proteinuria <500 mg/d, the EQuOR and EQuRR were undefined.
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500 mg/d, a substantial treatment effect was seen across all patients with a measurable outcome risk, including those at relatively low risk (1.7% annualized risk of progression). Conversely, among the 39% of patients with proteinuria <500 mg/d, no treatment benefit was found, even among patients with a relatively high risk for kidney disease progression (19.7% annualized risk of progression in the control group of the highest risk quartile). No risk x treatment heterogeneity was seen within the proteinuria strata (P = 0.29 for those with proteinuria
500 mg/d; P = 0. 08 for those with proteinuria <500 mg/d). Within the strata of patients with proteinuria
500 mg/d, the NNT ranged from 58 in the low-risk group to nine in the high-risk group (Tables 2 and 3). | Discussion |
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The model also revealed considerable heterogeneity of outcome risk in patients both with and without
500 mg/d proteinuria. Indeed, for patients with urine protein excretion <500 mg/d, because there were no outcomes in the lowest risk quartile, the extreme quartile rate ratio was undefined. For patients with urinary protein excretion
500 mg/d, the outcome rate for those at high risk was 19-fold higher than those at low risk.
To our knowledge, only one previous study examined the degree of heterogeneity of baseline risk in a IPDMA (5). That analysis included eight clinical trials (1792 patients, 2947 yr of follow-up) on the efficacy of high-dosage acyclovir in HIV infection and found a >100-fold difference in the risk for the outcome in the lowest compared with the highest risk quartiles. Our study results are consistent with their conclusions that meta-analysis may be a study design with extreme heterogeneity of the baseline risks compared with single studies. Indeed, using the same heterogeneity metrics, we found similarly high degrees of heterogeneity, because there were no outcomes in the lowest quartile.
However, despite the wide range in outcome risk, the treatment effect of ACEI was homogeneous on the relative risk scale across patients at different risk within each of the protein strata. Within the category of patients with proteinuria above this threshold, the beneficial effect of ACEI seems to be very strong and consistent across all categories of risk, even those at lowest risk. Patients with proteinuria below this threshold, however, do not seem to benefit. This is true even for patients who, on the basis of older age, higher serum creatinine, and higher systolic BP, are at considerable progression risk. Indeed, in the sample of patients who were included in these trials, targeting ACEI therapy to the 61% of patients with proteinuria
500 mg/d would lead to slightly better outcomes than population-wide therapy.
Our analysis confirms previous analyses of this database that demonstrated that the beneficial effect of ACEI is stronger in patients with greater proteinuria at the onset of therapy and that the greater degree of benefit is related to the antiproteinuric effects of ACEI (17,2022,24). However, it was unclear from these previous analyses whether patients with lower urine protein excretion obtained benefit from ACE inhibition or the absence of an effect was an artifact of the low outcome rate in the subgroup with less proteinuria. Our analysis shows that even among the subgroup of patients who have urine protein excretion <500 mg/d and are at relatively high risk for disease progression, ACEI therapy does not have any advantage in preventing kidney disease progression compared with other antihypertensive regimens. This suggests that proteinuria is a specific marker of risk that is modified by ACEI therapy versus other antihypertensive agents, whereas the other baseline risk factors (including age, BP, and serum creatinine) identify risk that is not specifically modifiable with ACEI therapy versus other antihypertensive agents.
The ratio of protein to creatinine concentration in spot urine samples has been shown to correlate well with 24-h urine protein excretion (25). Based in part on previously reported results from our database, recent guidelines recommend measurement of spot urine total protein to creatinine ratio in all patients with CKD, and use of ACEI or angiotensin receptor blockers is recommended in patients who have nondiabetic kidney disease and spot urine total protein to creatinine ratio >200 mg/g to slow progression of CKD (26). More recently, the development and application of a kidney risk score in patients with CKD for predicting progression was proposed by some (27). Our findings suggest that once proteinuria is taken into account, further scoring does not offer incremental value in the decision to initiate ACEI therapy for nondiabetic CKD.
Several recent studies have called into question the efficacy of ACEI compared with other antihypertensive agents in slowing the progression of kidney disease (28,29), most notably the Antihypertensive and Lipid Lowering Treatment to Prevent Heart Attack Trial (ALLHAT), (30,31) which failed to demonstrate the superiority of the ACEI lisinopril over other antihypertensive agents in CKD (32). The heterogenous benefits of ACEI on kidney disease progression according to the level of proteinuria has been invoked as an explanation for the results of ALLHAT (30,31), whose design features favored inclusion of lower risk patients with CKD (presumably with a low prevalence of proteinuria). Indeed, the annualized risk for progression in ALLHAT was <0.5%, placing them in our lowest risk quartile. From Figure 2 of our analysis, it becomes apparent that the small degree of absolute benefit to such low-risk patients that is expected to accrue even when they have significant proteinuria (approximately 0.2% per year) can easily be obscured by statistical fluctuations among low-proteinuria patientsparticularly when patients with low proteinuria predominated in the ALLHAT trial. Stratifying patients by both the risk for progression and degree of protein excretion as we have done here reveals differences in the treatment effect among patient groups on both the absolute and relative risk scale simultaneously, which can be helpful in understanding the heterogeneous results across trials.
Similarly, the overall results of the meta-analysis by Casas et al. (28), which did not suggest a specific benefit of ACEI, reflect primarily the results of ALLHAT, which overwhelmed the other studies. Indeed, the subgroup analysis that included just the trials that enrolled patients without diabetes and examined the outcome of kidney disease progression are in agreement with our results. Finally, a recent study by Suissa et al. (29) showed that the incidence of kidney failure in patients with diabetes was higher among patients who were on ACEI therapy. These results are of only indirect relevance to ours, because our database contained only patients without diabetes and theirs contained only patients with diabetes. Furthermore, we advise caution in interpreting the results of Suissa et al. given the nonrandomized nature of the study and the strength of the randomized evidence for benefit for inhibitors of the rennin-angiotensin system (3335). Thus, the previously reported results of the AIPRD Study databasethat the beneficial effects of ACEI in nondiabetic nephropathy seem to be greater than expected for the differences between randomized groups in the level of BP (22) and that these effects depend on the level of proteinuriahave not been directly challenged by the recently reported studies.
There are limitations to this study. Stratification of patients was based on a risk model that was developed on the same patient database. Overfitting of the risk model can potentially overestimate the degree of outcome risk heterogeneity. However, because we used only five especially salient clinical risk variables and did not mine the database for additional variables that might have more subtle influences, we do not believe that overfitting substantially influenced our results. An additional limitation of our study is the relative racial/ethnic homogeneity of the sample, which may limit the generalizability of the results to more diverse populations. Also, it should be noted that the included studies were not themselves designed to assess the protective effects of ACEI in patients with varying degrees of baseline proteinuria, and there is a risk for false-positive effects when multiple post hoc analyses are performed. However, testing for treatment modification by level of protein excretion was a primary aim for our IPDMA (20,21).
Last, this study does not address the potential benefit of ACEI therapy in preventing cardiovascular disease, an important therapeutic goal in CKD (35,36). The studies that were included in our IPDMA were not designed to assess the effectiveness of ACEI on cardiovascular events. Studies that have examined the effects of ACEI on cardiovascular outcomes in patients with kidney disease have not been wholly consistent in determining whether these agents have specific benefits compared with other antihypertensive agents (3739), although the results of some studies suggest that this effect, too, may be specific to or more pronounced in patients with greater proteinuria (39,40).
| Conclusion |
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500 mg/d, ACEI seem to be very effective, and some benefit is apparent even in patients who have otherwise favorable characteristics and are at relatively low risk for progression. However, for patients with lower urine protein excretion, ACEI do not seem to offer protection against kidney disease progression, even among patients with unfavorable risk characteristics and a relatively higher likelihood for progression. | Disclosures |
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| Acknowledgments |
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D.M.K. had full access to all of the data in the study and takes responsibility for the integrity of the data and the accuracy of the data analysis.
| Footnotes |
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| References |
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