This year’s UCLA Kidney Health Fair, sponsored by the University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA), takes place Sunday, March 26. It kicks off with a talk by Anjay Rastogi, MD, PhD, director of the UCLA Dialysis Program and a professor at the UCLA David Geffen School of Medicine.,
The fair, an annual event, is scheduled for 11 a.m. to 3 p.m. at Santa Monica Beach Park #1, Ocean Park Blvd. and Barnard Way, in Santa Monica.
Rastogi’s keynote speech will be followed by a variety of fun and educational activities, including a “KIDney” child-friendly zone, music, raffles, a silent auction, and an optional 2K walk or 3K run. The programs are aimed at patients and their children, friends and families living with kidney disease, high blood pressure or diabetes.
For adults, Los Angeles-based yoga teacher Natalie Macam of Malibu Beach Yoga and Agoura Power of Yoga will offer a fun yoga class (bring your mat) in which she’ll demonstrate key yoga poses considered helpful for persons battling kidney disease. Macam recently spent eight years in Asia, and often opens and closes her classes with her harmonium and essential oils.
Attendees at the UCLA Kidney Health Fair 2017 will also get the chance to learn more about kidney disease, dialysis, hypertension (high blood pressure), diabetes, kidney transplantation, polycystic kidney disease (PKD), Fabry’s disease and integrative medicine, as well as the importance of fitness, exercise and eating well.
The Kidney Health Fair is UCLA Nephrology’s main fundraising event of the year, with proceeds supporting its mission of providing first-rate clinical care, conducting cutting-edge research and improving kidney disease awareness, education and outreach.
“The future of academic nephrology will also require that we succeed in attracting the brightest creative minds into clinical and basic nephrology research,” Ira Kurtz, MD, chief of UCLA’s nephrology division, said in a statement. “To achieve this goal, the training faculty work to integrate the practical clinical knowledge of nephrology with the pursuit of modern scientific problems at the forefront of our field.”
Reata Pharmaceuticals is among the event’s sponsors, with an information table for participants. The company is currently conducting a Phase 2/3 clinical trial, called CARDINAL (NCT03019185), evaluating bardoxolone methyl as a treatment of kidney disease in Alport patients. The Phase 2 portion of the study is now enrolling eligible Alport syndrome patients at some 20 sites across the U.S.; more information is available via its clinical trials.gov webpage.