Drug May Treat Advanced Kidney Disease

Doctors in China report that the blood pressure drug Lotensin may help patients with advanced chronic kidney disease.

The doctors write in The New England Journal of Medicine that patients taking Lotensin showed "substantial" kidney benefits.

In those patients, none of whom had diabetes, kidney disease progressed more slowly with Lotensin than their peers who took a placebo drug.

The study was done at Nanfang Hospital at Southern Medical University in Guangzhou, China. The hospital has a center for kidney disease care. The researchers included Fan Fan Hou, MD, PhD (http://www.webmd.com/).