Kidney disease is a growing and significant public health challenge for older adults. After decades of increasing burden, approximately 40 percent of all older adults (>22.4 million) in the United States now live with kidney disease (chronic kidney disease [CKD], end-stage kidney disease [ESKD], and kidney transplantation [KT]). Yet, older adults with kidney disease are underrepresented in research. Nephrology care is often “one size fits all,” which fails to account for the conditions and syndromes that are more common in older adults. Age disparities in kidney disease result in suboptimal care for older adults.

The Kidney Disease Aging Research Collaborative (KDARC) was formed by Mara McAdams DeMarco, PhD (NYU Grossman School of Medicine and NYU Langone Health), and Rasheeda Hall, PhD (Duke University), to address the three main barriers of geriatric nephrology research: organizational barriers that dissuade interinstitutional collaborations; data barriers that leave pressing research questions unanswered; and workforce development barriers that impede new investigators from entering the field. KDARC is funded by the National Institute on Aging (grants #R61AG086824 and #K02AG076883).

Our Mission

The goal of KDARC is to conduct and promote interdisciplinary collaborative research that encompasses the study of both physiological and chronological aging and related concepts in persons with kidney disease.

KDARC will create an interdisciplinary research network on topics that span mechanistic to health services and bioethical issues in clinical care. This network will facilitate multisite studies (clinical trials and observational studies), encourage uniform outcome selection, and promote community–academic partnerships. The network will also promote inclusion of this patient population in clinical trials.

KDARC will also:

• develop educational content for persons with kidney disease and their caregivers
• develop and promote clinical resources that facilitate care of persons with kidney disease who have aging-related problems (e.g., clinical practice guidelines, effective models of care)
• promote professional development for clinicians and researchers engaged in work focused on aging patients with kidney disease