Strength and limitations of this review
This is review of literature on prevalence, risk factors and awareness screening in Southeast Nigeria providing an overview of this important topic. The identification of emerging risk factors has filled a gap in the assessment of risk factor of CKD. A major drawback in these studies is that the estimated GFR of those who were observed to have CKD was only assessed once. Ideally, the assessments should have been repeated 3 months later to find out if the values of the estimated GFR were still below 60 mL/min/10.73m2 in those with CKD1. This would have given an accurate prevalence of CKD with creatinine equations. It is worth noting that one of the studies did repeat the GFR estimation 3 months later; estimated GFR<60mL/min/1.73m2 was found in 7.8% respondents at the first assessment had persistently low GFR at reassessment 3 months later15. The sharp drop in the prevalence clearly shows that a good majority of the earlier captured subjects did not have CKD. A major limitation of the study that repeated the estimation of GFR 3 months later is that the sample size was small (328), and the value obtained is not likely to be the true prevalence of CKD in Nigeria. However, the prevalence of CKD is most likely to be below 10% and may be close to 4.6% using the MDRD and CKD-EPI creatinine equation.