In the USA in June 2013 the OPTN/UNOS Board of Directors approved amendments to the OPTN policy for deceased donor kidney allocation. These ideas have been discussed for the last 9 years and Nate wrote about some of…
All to often now doctors in well-resourced hospitals rely on high tech, expensive and sometimes invasive tests to make a diagnosis. One of the most basic and cheapest tools we have at our disposal is the bedside urine…
This is a really exciting bracket and is full of new agents that will hopefully lead to major advances in our field. Acthar is the outlier here as, even though it is a peptide, it is not an…
The electrolyte bracket contains a mixture of the old staples of nephrology mixed with some new kids on the block trying to muscle in on established territory, Vaptans vs hypertonic saline and ZS-9 vs Kayexalate. Hypertonic saline is…
In the kidney stone bracket I think the most disappointed team must be XO inhibitors. Allopurinol has been around for a long time and is one of the mainstays of treatment for gout. More recently, febuxostat hit the…
In the Renal Replacement bracket we see all the usual players, except for convective clearance, which is not in mainstream use in chronic dialysis units in the US. It is relatively unknown this side of the Atlantic (west…
In the AKI bracket one team caught my eye, RIPC, Remote Ischemic Preconditioning. This is a procedure of inducing transient ischemia in the arm by inflating a BP cuff for 5 minutes x2 with an interim deflation for…
The kidney regeneration bracket is full of heavy weights as usual! However, not being in the field myself one team jumped out for me, Bioartificial Kidney. As the authors of this piece say this is truly the holy…
In the poisons and toxins bracket I learnt some interesting facts. The Dietary Supplement Health and Education Act of 1994 (DSHEA 94) is an example of the power of big business in Washington. Subsequent to acts such as…
So it is that time of the year again, NephMadness 2014! I am hoping it doesn’t distract me too much from the basketball… This year’s bracket has thrown up some very interesting match ups. I had a really…
