Anti-Nephrin Antibodies in Minimal Change Disease
Approach to the Patient with Peritoneal Dialysis Catheter Dysfunction- Part 1
Want to write a case report? RFN has you covered with a list of journals to choose from
Have a Nephrology Question? There Might Be A #Tweetorial For That!
Conferences, Courses, & Grants
FOAMed
Interventional Nephrology Series
Focus on Point-of-Care Ultrasound in Nephrology (POCUN) Series
Kidney Biopsy of the Month Series
Metformin-induced Lactic Acidosis
Metformin is the only hypoglycemic agent proven to reduce mortality in Type 2 DM. As such, we really should be making every effort to prescribe it, and keep patients taking it. Unfortunately, mostly due to it’s relationship to…
General Support for Kidney Allocation Score
Final results of last week’s Poll of the Week: only 13% of individuals said they outright disapproved of the proposed Kidney Allocation Score, the scoring system which has been proposed to replace the current system of determining kidney…
Classification of Cryoglobulins and MPGN
Cryoglobulinemia is characterized by the presence of circulating antibodies which precipitate at cooler temperatures, and not infrequently leads to renal failure/glomerulonephritis. The stereotypical histologic lesion of cryoglobulinemia is membranoproliferative glomerulonephritis, which takes the appearance on light microscopy of…
Understanding nPCR (Normalized Protein Catabolic Rate)
The normalized protein catabolic rate (nPCR) is a formula commonly used to assess dietary protein intake in dialysis patients, as a means towards determining nutritional adequacy, a major problem in many ESRD patients. For example, say you have…
Complement Levels & Glomerulonephritis
Although the complement cascade is an essential aspect of the response to infection, it unfortunately can be activated by a variety of means in several types of kidney disease. In common day clinical practice, most of the time…
Secondary Causes of Membranous Nephropathy
Although the majority of membranous nephropathy falls under the “idiopathic” category, there are a variety of causes of secondary membranous nephropathy. It is quite important to eliminate these entities as possible diagnoses, as the treatment for secondary membranous…
Serum Amyloid P prevents renal fibrosis
Congratulations to my colleague at the Brigham, Jeremy Duffield, who made the cover of Science this week for demonstrating human Serum Amyloid P (hSAP) potently inhibits fibrosis in two independent models of renal fibrosis. hSAP is a naturally…
Results of Kidney Biopsy Poll
The results from last week’s Poll of the Week are in, and in general, a majority of individuals (64%) felt that their training programs did a good job of teaching them the art of the renal biopsy, while…
TREAT Trial
The TREAT trial was one of the bigger stories to emerge from this years ASN. This was a large, multicenter trial of darbepoeitin (Aranesp) vs. placebo in 4000 predialysis CKD patients with type 2 diabetes and anemia. The…
The Uroplakins
We are taught that water is freely diffusable via cell membranes–even in the absence of aquaporin function, there are usually some water molecules which traverse the lipid bilayer. However, there are tissues within the human body which must…