Feature Channels: Kidney Disease

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The American Thyroid Association has awarded a 2018 Research Grant to Nicholas J. Tardi, PhD, Instructor in Internal Medicine at Rush University Medical Center in Chicago. Dr. Tardi’s project is titled “Deiodinase 3: A Thyroid Hormone-Associated Renoprotective Protein.” The long-term goal of this project is to identify the source and mechanism of kidney and thyroid comorbidity. Thyroid hormone (TH) is a circulating, lipid-soluble molecule that plays an important physiological and developmental role in nearly all cells. Accordingly, precise control of TH activity is crucial to maintain metabolic homeostasis in several tissues.

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PHOENIX ─ Mayo Clinic Hospital, Phoenix, Arizona is again ranked No. 1 in Arizona and the Phoenix metro area, and No. 11 nationally by U.S. News & World Report. This marks the second time Mayo Clinic has been recognized with two hospitals on U.S. News & World Report's "Best Hospitals Honor Roll," which includes the top 20 hospitals in the nation. Mayo Clinic’s campus in Rochester, Minnesota, ranked No. 1 nationally. The results were announced today on the U.S. News & World Report web site.

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Tracking just seven factors of heart attack patients when they are first admitted to the hospital can help flag those most at risk for 30-day readmission, researchers from UT Southwestern found.

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• Older adults who initiate dialysis for kidney failure face a higher likelihood of being diagnosed with dementia and Alzheimer’s disease. • Certain risk factors were linked this higher risk. • Older hemodialysis patients with a diagnosis of dementia or Alzheimer’s disease had a high risk of early death.

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Older kidney disease patients who are sick enough to require the blood-filtering treatment known as dialysis are at high risk of dementia, including Alzheimer’s disease, according to a study led by scientists at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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Penn Team Eradicates Hepatitis C in 20 Patients Following Lifesaving Transplants from Infected Donors

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Papers on nephrotoxicity, nanomaterial genotoxicity, machine learning; arsenic and telomere length in children; iPSC-derived cardiomyoctes for drug safety studies; and asthma, air pollution, and immunity featured in latest issue of Toxicological Sciences

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Connecting two previously unrelated insights about the formation of pediatric kidney cancer, researchers at UT Southwestern Medical Center have uncovered the means by which the cancer continues to grow, providing potential targets for more effective treatments in the future.

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Anyone who has developed a kidney stone will tell you that the pain of passing one is worth an ounce of prevention.

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In patients with chronic kidney disease, medical nutrition therapy can slow the progression and significantly reduce healthcare costs.But 90 percent of non-dialysis kidney disease patients never meet with a dietitian, according to a report in the Journal of the Academy of Nutrition and Dietetics.

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Researchers at Wake Forest Baptist Medical Center have shown that gene expression analysis of blood samples taken from the recipients of transplanted kidneys can be used to better understand the mechanisms that promote repair and regeneration of the transplanted organs.

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High-tech medicine and human kindness combine in UAB’s ongoing kidney chain, a series of transplant surgeries that have given 101 people a new lease on life.

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• In an interview study of kidney specialists, 4 different approaches to discussing the option of dialysis versus conservative management for older patients with kidney failure were evident. • Nephrologists should reflect on their approach and understand the strengths and weaknesses of each.

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The ASN Foundation for Kidney Research provides more than $3 million in funding for clinical and basic research for members at all stages of their careers.

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Phospholipases are enzymes that cleave the tail group off of phospholipids, which make up cell membranes. These tails, or free fatty acids, can go on to act as signaling molecules. Lysosomal phospholipase A2, or LPA2, is a phospholipase from the macrophages that protect the lung.

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People with chronic kidney disease are at unusually high risk of also developing cardiovascular disease; in fact, a patient with non-dialysis kidney disease is more likely to die of heart failure than to develop end-stage kidney failure. However traditional atherosclerosis risk factors contribute less strongly to cardiovascular disease in chronic kidney disease patients than in subjects with intact kidney function.

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Researchers have long sought drugs that could help to prevent diabetic kidney disease (DKD), which afflicts about 40% of people with type 2 diabetes. Among the current contenders are a class of diabetes management drugs known as DPP-4 inhibitors. Scientists at Joslin Diabetes Center now have shown that in mouse models of diabetic kidney disease, the DPP-4 inhibitor linagliptin produces two signs of prevention against kidney damage.

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• Among individuals with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease, those who were treated with tolvaptan for up to 11 years had a slower rate of kidney function decline compared with historical controls. • Annualized kidney function decline rates of tolvaptan-treated patients did not change during follow-up.

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In a study published in the journal Science, researchers suggest that ZHX2 is a potential new therapeutic target for clear cell renal cell carcinoma, which is the most common type of kidney cancer.

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With the opening of a pre-transplant kidney evaluation clinic in Jackson, Tennessee, the Vanderbilt Transplant Center is joining a range of other clinical programs participating in telemedicine at Vanderbilt University Medical Center (VUMC).

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SLU surgeon Sameer A. Siddiqui, M.D., and his research team examined patient records to study the best approach for renal trauma injuries.

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• Compared with warfarin use, direct oral anticoagulant use was linked with a 23% higher risk of bleeding in patients with chronic kidney disease. • There was no difference between direct oral anticoagulant and warfarin users in benefits from prevention of ischemic stroke.

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Study findings from a team of scientists led by George C. Tsokos, MD, Chief of the Division of Rheumatology at BIDMC, overturn conventional wisdom about kidney disease.

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A comprehensive study by the Keck School of Medicine of USC has found that robotic partial nephrectomy offers significantly better patient outcomes as compared with open or laparoscopic techniques.

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New evidence shows the power of a method aimed at changing the longstanding problem of encouraging patients with chronic diseases to take their medicine faithfully: insurance plans that charge patients less for the medicines that could help them most. Some plans even make some of the medicines free to the patients with certain conditions.

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The Loyola Center for Cancer Care & Research at Palos Health South Campus in Orland Park is the first center in Illinois – and only the fifth in the country – to offer a groundbreaking MRI-guided radiation therapy that targets tumors with millimeter precision.

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• A synthetic adeno-associated virus was highly efficient at delivering genetic material to different kidney cell types in mice and humans. • The viral vector was also successfully used in gene therapy strategies to treat mice with kidney scarring.

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Research led by Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis has shown, in mice, that genetic material can be delivered to damaged cells in the kidneys, a key step toward developing gene therapy to treat chronic kidney disease. The potentially fatal condition affects 30 million Americans, most of whom don’t realize they have chronic kidney disease.

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New research links outdoor air pollution — even at levels deemed safe — to an increased risk of diabetes globally, according to a study from Washington University School of Medicine in St. Louis and the Veterans Affairs (VA) St. Louis Health Care System. The findings raise the possibility that reducing pollution may lead to a drop in diabetes cases in heavily polluted countries such as India and less polluted ones such as the United States.

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A new study finds a newer blood thinner may be a safer choice for reducing stroke risk in those who have both end-stage kidney disease and atrial fibrillation.

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• Patients with advanced kidney disease described feelings of isolation, abandonment, alienation, mistrust, and even self-blame that would likely be surprising to the clinicians taking care of them.

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Kidney diseases have so far been underestimated in many respects: most people are not aware of their impaired kidney function. In general, kidney diseases are “silent diseases”, most often there are no apparent early symptoms. Many people with kidney diseases are not aware that they have been living with higher risks of cardiovascular diseases, infections, hospitalizations, and of course kidney failure which requires dialysis or transplantation.

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Administration of nitric oxide gas during and for 24 hours following heart surgery decreased the risk of patients developing acute and chronic kidney problems, a randomized, controlled trial conducted in China found.

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• In states that expanded Medicaid under the Affordable Care Act to cover more low-income individuals, there was an increase in the number of Medicaid beneficiaries who were preemptively waitlisted to receive a kidney transplant. • Medicaid expansion was associated with greater gains racial and ethnic minorities in being listed pre-emptively on the transplant waitlist compared with whites.

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• The blood pressure–lowering medication ramipril reduced protein excretion—or proteinuria—in children with chronic kidney disease. • Greater reductions in proteinuria during the first months of treatment were linked with a lower risk of kidney disease progression.

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More than 500 men who suffered with problems urinating due to an enlarged prostate have undergone holmium laser enucleation of the prostate (HoLEP), a minimally invasive procedure, at Scott & White Medical Center – Temple. This innovative urological procedure provides much-needed relief for men with a prostate enlargement, also known as benign prostatic hyperplasia (BPH), a condition that can prevent the bladder from emptying properly and could lead to kidney damage or failure.

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Diagnosing type 2 diabetes in clinical practice may require only a single blood sample, according to a study led by researchers at Johns Hopkins Bloomberg School of Public Health.

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DRG International, a leading international medical diagnostic company, will showcase the NEW DRG® Hepcidin 25 (bioactive) HS (High Sensitive) ELISA Kit (EIA-5782R) at the 2018 AACC Conference in Chicago, Illinois from July 29 – August 2. As the first of its kind to market, this kit accurately detects bioactive Hepcidin levels as an additional marker to aid in identifying a variety of disorders.

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Research published in JAMA Internal Medicine found that tamsulosin does not significantly effect patient-reported passage or capture of kidney stones.

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• Researchers have identified genetic variants linked to an increased risk of developing nephrotic syndrome, a pediatric kidney disease. • The variants are found in genomic regions involved in regulation of the immune response.

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Scientists have developed an algorithm that predicts potentially dangerous low blood pressure, or hypotension, that can occur during surgery. The algorithm identifies hypotension 15 minutes before it occurs in 84 percent of cases, the researchers report in a new study published in the Online First edition of Anesthesiology.

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• Among individuals with chronic kidney disease, hard illicit drug use was associated with higher risks of kidney disease progression and early death. • Tobacco smoking was associated with a higher risk of early death. • Alcohol drinking was associated with a lower risk of early death.

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The number of insurance denials for life-saving hepatitis C drugs among patients with both private and public insurers remains high across the United States. Private insurers had the highest denial rates, with 52.4 percent of patients denied coverage, while Medicaid denied 34.5 percent of patients and Medicare denied 14.7 percent.

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Results of a large-scale study suggest that the oral diabetes drug metformin is safe for most diabetics who also have chronic kidney disease (CKD). The study of more than 150,000 adults by Johns Hopkins Medicine investigators found that metformin’s association with the development of a life-threatening condition called lactic acidosis was seen only among patients with severely decreased kidney function.

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An experimental drug that blocks abnormal neural communication after spinal cord injury could one day be the key to improving quality of life by improving bladder function, new research suggests.

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The latest research and features in cell biology in the Cell Biology News Source

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Artificial Intelligence (AI) will be deployed against Mount Sinai’s massive patient data warehouse biorepository and to innovate more accurate disease detection and management for introduction in 2019

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• Among living kidney donors, the post-donation concern that was considered most important was kidney health, followed by the surgical, lifestyle, functional, and psychosocial impacts of donation. • The hypothetical long-term risks associated with kidney removal—including mortality and cardiovascular disease—were of relatively lower importance.

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The nationally recognized Kidney Cancer Program at UT Southwestern Medical Center’s Harold C. Simmons Comprehensive Cancer Center led a team of investigators who identified a new way to help doctors determine the prognosis for patients with stage 3 kidney cancer, which has important implications for decisions about surgery and inclusion in clinical trials.

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• A secondary analysis of a clinical trial has shown that when all patients with type 2 diabetes received comparable diabetes-related care, black race was not associated with accelerated kidney function decline, and fewer black participants developed chronic kidney disease.