Chronic kidney disease and the FLOW result posts 31–39

Reading back through the chronic kidney disease threads from last year, the same three questions come up every time and only one of them has ever been answered properly. That seems like a documentation gap rather than a knowledge gap.

What I would want before treating chronic kidney disease as settled: the method, the sample, and whether anyone tried to find the opposite result. Two of the three are usually missing.

Asking about a population rather than about yourself is a legitimate framing and generally gets a better answer, because the general case is answerable.

This follows post #31 rather than contradicting it.

Chronic kidney disease: compounds in this class have renal benefit in people with kidney disease. The benefit appears to be additive to other renal-protective agents, not a replacement for them.

Following, with nothing to contribute beyond having asked the same thing elsewhere.

Cardiovascular disease: several compounds have cardiovascular outcome trials. SELECT was in people without diabetes; SUSTAIN 6 was in high-risk diabetes. Absolute benefit is largest in high-risk people.

Old habit: I write down the expected answer before I calculate it.

I would put moderate confidence on the mainstream reading of chronic kidney disease and no more. That is not scepticism for its own sake; it is where the sourcing actually stops.

The question underneath chronic kidney disease is usually "how would I tell?" rather than "what is true?", and that one has a method attached to it.

Write down what you would expect to see under each hypothesis before you collect anything. If they predict the same observation, collecting it will not help.

Post-authorisation safety studies are the place where under-studied populations eventually appear, and they are public.