The discovery of aquaporins–the protein family of water channels which regulate water transport in the kidney and many other tissues–was considered significant enough to win the Nobel Prize in Chemistry for Peter Agre in 2003. The aquaporins…
Sjogren’s syndrome is an autoimmune disorder in which there is immune-mediated damage to the exocrine glands which produce tears and saliva. Many patients (up to 25%) will have extraglandular manifestations of the disease, one of the possibilities of…
Okay, you’re probably not going to see this in your lifetime, but imagine how cool you’ll seem when you whip out “matchstick ingestion” as part of the differential diagnosis for hyperkalemia and AKI. Matchstick heads are comprised of…
TB is classically thought of as a pulmonary disease–and in general, this is true, as pulmonary TB is by far the most common (and often very severe) manifestation of infection by Mycobacterium tuberculosis. However, the most common NON-pulmonary…
The issue comes up all the time: you try and set up one of your ESRD patients for a procedure requiring iv contrast, such as a cardiac catheterization or a PE-protocol CT scan. You get a call from…
Time for some “Renal Radiology Rounds.” The case involves a 77 year-old man with a history of severe benign prostatic hypertrophy. He had been advised to have a TURP in the past but had repeatedly declined. He was…
A recent JAMA article (Parienti et al, JAMA 2008) was presented in journal club today which involved a randomized control trial looking at infectious and other complications seen in patients with acute kidney injury in an ICU who…
Although mutations in the gene HNF-1beta (or TCF2) were originally discovered in patients with mature-onset diabetes of the young (MODY), patients with these mutations more commonly present with a variable renal phenotype. Interestingly, a study by Egdhill et….
Hepatitis B–a disease which in the U.S. is on the decline due to regular childhood vaccinations–has a variety of interesting associations with renal disease. There are three distinct glomerular diseases with which the hepatitis B virus is associated….
Staghorn calculi are upper urinary tract kidney stones which involve the renal pelvis and involve at least two of the calyces. They are formed in the setting of an alkaline pH and urease-producing micro-organisms, which leads to the…