Opinion: Had I done Ancestry.com sooner, I could have gotten a kidney transplant two years earlier
For the past few years, experts have criticized — and defended — the use of race in calculating an important number for people with kidney disease: the estimated glomerular filtration rate (eGFR). As a Black woman who has lived with kidney disease for decades, I learned the hard way that race should not be part of this equation.
Kidney disease usually develops over a number of years, and eGFR is a valuable way to monitor its trajectory. Although the maximum eGFR value can be greater than 100, it’s easy to think of it as akin to a percentage, representing a person’s kidney function compared to “normal.” The higher the eGFR, the better the kidneys are functioning.
