What do you need to know as a nursing student about Chronic Kidney Disease?Today I'm going to be talking about chronic kidney disease. When a patient has a problem with their kidneys, it can either be an acute problem or a chronic problem. So it could be acute kidney injury which can often be reversed and fixed or it could be chronic kidney disease and that is not reversible. With chronic kidney disease they will eventually need dialysis or a kidney transplant. Chronic kidney disease is an irreversible loss of kidney function that happens slowly over time. It's often called a “silent disease” because it usually presents with no symptoms at first. We can say that a person has chronic kidney disease once their glomerular filtration rate or GFR is less than 60 ml per minute.