850 million individuals suffer from chronic kidney disease (CKD), while diabetes, cancer, and HIV/AIDS affect 422, 42, and 37 million individuals, respectively. End stage renal disease (ESRD) hence places a heavy burden on health systems worldwide. Linked to that, the kidney-disease-associated mortality rate worldwide has risen over the past decade, now causing the death of 5 to 10 million individuals every year.
In kidney transplantation, numerous parameters such as demographic, clinical and functional factors drive the deterioration of the kidney, sometimes leading to graft failure. Current approaches for investigating the relationship between these factors and graft failure have been limited by standard statistical approaches and by registries with an overall lack on granular data, including infrequent kidney function measurements for a single patient and convenience clinical samples. Identifying the determinants of graft failure with a dynamic approach may bring an original perspective to the traditional graft survival risk prediction model that are impeded by their reliance on low-granularity datasets, cross-sectional parameters, and limited follow-up.
