Chennai, March 1: Prevention is better than cure for people with kidney ailments, a Chennai-based non-government organisation has shown.

The Kidney Help Trust has developed an ?effective, low-cost community model? to prevent chronic renal failures.

This will come as a relief to people with kidney problems as the average cost of a renal transplant in the country is Rs 3.50 lakh and it takes as much as Rs 2.50 lakh a year to keep a patient on dialysis ? the only two methods of treatment.

The trust focused on controlling diabetes and hypertension, which are ?responsible for the largest number of kidney patients? in the country through a simple and low-cost method.

Eight years ago, the trust began an experiment in 26 villages in Sriperumbudur taluk of Kancheepuram district in Tamil Nadu, which have a population of around 23,000, according to Dr M.K. Mani, the chief nephrologist at Apollo Hospital here and the managing trustee of the help trust.

Health workers went door to door in Madhuramangalam block to locate people with diabetes or high blood pressure, who were then examined by a doctor from the trust. Diabetes was treated with low-cost drugs and hypertension with the tranquiliser reserpine.

The trust regularly monitored the blood pressure and the diabetes and the dosage was adjusted accordingly, said Mani. He said 90 per cent of the people cooperated and the blood pressure of hypertensive people was brought under control in 96 per cent of the cases and glycated haemoglobin (a measure of diabetes) brought to the normal level in 52 per cent of the cases.

The cost of the project works out to ?just Rs 14.23 per capita per year?, according to the trustee, without taking into account the simple tests done at the Apollo Hospital.

Considering that both the central and state governments spend Rs 370 per capita per year on health, the trust?s low-cost experiment could be replicated in other areas and be made part of a government programme, he said.

The trust also screened the people of the adjacent Kadambattur block, which has a population of 21,000, for diabetes and hypertension, eight years ago. Now Madhuramangalam, which was covered by the project for the last eight years, has a far less number of people with the likelihood of kidney failure than Kadambattur, which was not covered.

?It appears that we have prevented 25 patients per 1,000 of the population from developing kidney failure,? said Mani.