clipped from ndt.oxfordjournals.org

CRF and ESRD are among major causes of morbidity and mortality worldwide. Two approaches are adopted for defining the magnitude of CRF. The first is to establish the prevalence of ESRD p.m.p. and the second is to establish the acceptance rate of patients with ESRD for RRT. Since in our country the government does not support the treatment of the majority of these patients, and the majority of patients are not able to afford any form of RRT, the acceptance rate would grossly underestimate the magnitude of ESRD. Furthermore, in India, there is no registry of patients with CRF itself or of patients with ESRD accepted into an RRT programme. Given a health care system quite different from Western ones, finding out the incidence of CRF in India will be very difficult: individual patients do not always go to one specific dispensary, so medical records are fragmented.