Name: Kabeya Mwintshi MD
Where: St. Louis ConnectCare and in private practice
Specialties/Board Certifications: Nephrology
Education:
1990 – University of Kinshasa, Democratic Republic of Congo
1993-1997 – Internal Medicine Residency at University of Pretoria Medical School, South Africa
1998 – Attending physician at Medical University of Southern Africa
1999 – Attending physician at University of Pretoria, South Africa
2003 – Internal Medicine Residency at SSM St. Mary’s, St. Louis, Mo.
2009 – Washington University St. Louis, Fellowship in Kidney Disease
Career Highlights:
Private practice in Witbank in South Africa before emigrating to the U.S. Current private practice with three colleagues at Nephrology and Hypertension Specialists, LLC in Florissant, Mo.
St. Louis Connection:
Internal medicine residency at SSM St. Mary’s and kidney disease fellowship at Washington University
Why I chose specializing in nephrology and high blood pressure:
I like kidney disease. I have a lot of interest in kidney disease and hypertension. It’s a big burden on the health care as it is. It tends to affect disproportionately minorities as well.
It’s a very common disease, I think often under-diagnosed and misunderstood.
First of all, people think when they have backache, they have kidney disease and backache has got nothing to do with kidney disease for the most part. Ninety-nine percent of kidney disease does not cause any backache.
Secondly, kidney disease can be silent. Someone can have kidney disease and does not have any symptoms and you need to have a proactive attitude toward looking for it and making a diagnosis.
With the work from the National Kidney Foundation and the American Society for Nephrology, there is increased awareness and more and more primary care physicians are testing. And people don’t understand it as much as they can heart attack, for instance, or stroke.
I think the level of burden kidney disease is causing is important and the population needs to be very much aware. In today’s world, every time you get a chest pain, everybody knows that could be a heart attack, but in the kidney, we don’t realize that yet.
The relationship between hypertension and kidney disease is just like the chicken and the egg. Hypertension is the second leading cause of kidney disease and the leading cause is diabetes. As you can imagine, a lot of hypertensive people with diabetes wind up having kidney disease. In return, kidney diseases cause hypertension. When someone comes to our office with kidney disease and hypertension, it is difficult sometimes to tell which one came first, so they are both linked. So you can imagine, if you have hypertension that is not treated, it causes kidney disease. Then that kidney disease will worsen your hypertension and your hypertension will worsen your kidney disease. It becomes a vicious circle which needs to be broken – so there’s a tight relationship between both of them and both of them are silent, because someone can have hypertension and not know about it.
By the time you start having symptoms, it may be too late.