Arterial stiffness and chronic kidney disease: lessons from the Chronic Renal Insufficiency Cohort study

The purpose of this review is to highlight what the Chronic Renal Insufficiency Cohort (CRIC) study has taught us regarding arterial stiffness in chronic kidney disease. The CRIC study began in mid-2003 and enrolled more than 3900 people with chronic kidney disease.

The recent findings from the CRIC study are covered in 10 lessons. Within the CRIC study, we enrolled about 2800 participants who underwent a pulse wave velocity measurement. At the time of initial funding, very little was known about the role of arterial stiffness in chronic, nondialyzed, kidney disease. The lessons span the gamut from simple correlations to measures such as central arterial pressure profiles and reproducibility of pulse wave velocity measurements between operators, to relationships of pulse wave velocity to kidney function, protein excretion, cardiovascular disease prevalence, and incident cardiovascular events such as heart failure.

The implications from these lessons are that pulse wave velocity is a robust, reproducible measure of arterial stiffness which adds important information to standard clinical assessments such as SBP and DBP in a population with chronic kidney disease, a disorder with high likelihood of progressive kidney function loss, and a substantial predisposition to cardiovascular disease.