How to use Folia if you have IgA Nephropathy

IgA Nephropathy, like many chronic conditions, affects everyone differently. What may cause someone to spike a fever may not for someone else. One person with IgAN may want to track fatigue daily, whereas someone else may prefer to track swelling and foamy urine.

At Folia, we want to make sure you can track whatever you want, however you want. We want it to feel like a handwritten journal in the sense that you can choose what you capture each day, but unlike a written journal, let you use your data to see insights about your health.

While you can use Folia in many different ways (here’s more general information about using Folia for IgAN), below are two examples of how you could use Folia for IgAN:

Faster flare-up recovery

Sherri gets upper respiratory infections (URIs) quite often in the fall and winter, so she wanted to understand how URIs affect her IgAN. She uses Folia to track her symptoms fairly regularly (she tracks as part of her evening routine), so she started to also track when she got an URI in the “What Else Happened” section of her Journal.

 She also tracks her flare-ups using the Flare feature, and notes “Illness” and “Respiratory Infection” as a trigger on the flare form, along with the symptoms that are flaring. 

She was able to see in her Insights section that Illness/URIs were causing her back pain and fatigue to skyrocket. What helped her most during these flares was making sure she got enough sleep and rest. 

Now, when she feels a URI coming on, she moves upcoming plans around as much as possible to make sure she can get plenty of rest and sleep to help her recover as quickly as possible.

Beating the bloat: Uncovering the real trigger

Chris was put on prednisone, and started noticing he would get bloated more often than not. He thought it was the prednisone, so he started tracking when he was feeling bloated so he could let his doctor know how the prednisone was affecting him. He tracked what time he would start to feel bloated so he could figure out if it always happened a certain amount of time after taking his medication.

 He would also track his meals regularly, and he soon realized that his bloating would happen shortly after eating, but not after every meal.

He started tracking his meals a little more closely, noting if he had gluten, dairy, red meat, tree nuts etc. He soon discovered it was actually gluten and dairy that was causing his bloat more than the prednisone. With some diet changes, he’s able to manage the bloat most of the time.