In 2002, the National Kidney Foundation published treatment guidelines that identified five stages of Chronic Kidney Disease (CKD) based on declining GFR measurements. The guidelines recommend different actions based on the stage of kidney disease.
CSV (Comma Separated Value) was a file format devised to store tabular data. It uses commas to separate each entry in a row and the newline symbol to go to the next row. Excel is a more recent spreadsheet application from Microsoft and it saves the data with its own file format.
CSV is a delimited text file that uses a comma to separate values (many implementations of CSV import/export tools allow other separators to be used). Simple CSV implementations may prohibit field values that contain a comma or other special characters such as newlines.