I recently saw a patient with proximal muscle weakness and mild hypophosphatemia, and I wondered whether a serum phosphorous level of 2.2 mg/dL could be the cause. We know that moderate hypophosphatemia is associated with skeletal and smooth…
No, this is not the title of the next Dan Brown novel (although the quality of the writing may sometimes compare, you will not find phrases like “the famous man looked at the red cup” here). I’m referring…
Pancreas transplantation is considered the treatment of choice for patients with refractory Type I Diabetes Mellitus. The first pancreas transplant was described in 1967 by Kelly et al. (pictured) and was performed with a simultaneous kidney transplant in…
Average fructose intake in the U.S. is staggering: Americans currently consume approx. 150 pounds of sugar a year, which is 20 times the amount their European ancestors would have ingested from fruit (Data from USDA). This intake is…
Having just returned from my own honeymoon, I was taken by this recent hypothesis-piece by Fishbane et al. They have made some observations on the natural history of untreated renal anemia from examining the placebo arm of the…
A paradigm of modern genetic studies, such as GWAS, is that there is a natural balance to allelic variation, with common variation in the population conferring mild disease risk and, conversely, genes of strong disease effect being rare….
We recently saw a case of adult-onset dense deposit disease (DDD) at pathology conference. DDD is rare, affecting 1-3 per million people. For historical reasons it has been classified under the membranoproliferative subgroup of disease patterns (as type…
We have recently posted about problems using warfarin in renal patients. On a similar note, I was recently involved in the care of a 58-year-old African-American patient who presented with oliguric AKI and a supratherapeutic INR level of…
It can often be difficult to stop something once it’s been started; take statins for example. It seems that despite consistent evidence from two large, randomized controlled trails demonstrating the lack efficacy of statins for preventing cardiovascular mortality…
Millions of people take long-term proton pump inhibitors for acid-related GI complaints. These agents are very effective and appear to have an excellent safety profile. However, they may also have interesting effects on calcium and phosphate balance that…
