One of the easier aspects to taking an examination like the boards is pattern recognition: there are certain images or associations that should be immediate triggers for a particular diagnosis. One good example of this is a knowledge…
There are only limited treatment options for hepatorenal syndrome, and many would argue that treatment of type I hepatorenal syndrome (the bad kind) in the absence of a plan for liver transplantation is a futile effort. Over the…
Pictured on the left is Bob Cratchit and his crippled son, Tiny Tim, two beloved characters from Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol. In this fun 1992 article by the pediatrician D.L. Lewis, the case is made that Tiny…
Though rare, propofol infusion syndrome (PRIS) is a cause of acute kidney injury in the appropriate ICU setting. As we all know, propofol is an intravenous sedative currently favored in the ICU due to relatively short half-life and…
Hyponatremia can be broadly divided into two fundamental categories: “true hyponatremia” (in which the serum sodium concentration is truly less than normal), or “pseudohyponatremia,” in which the serum sodium concentration is actually normal but erroneously reported as low…
Let’s talk about rapid A.B.G. analysis. Just to clarify, I’m talking about arterial blood gases, not the religious rap group “Adopted By Grace” I just discovered existing by googling the phrase “ABG”. I tend to use Winter’s Formula…
This month’s Kidney International features an interesting report by Vaidya et al which reports on the development of a potentially useful dipstick test able to detect urinary Kim-1, a promising new biomarker for acute kidney injury. As we…
For a while, maybe longer if I do…. No, I’m not talking about the one-hit wonder song “Amy” by Pure Prairie League…I’m talking about AAMI (the Association for the Advancement of Medical Instrumentation), the organization which regulates water…
Dialysis catheters: the bane of the renal fellow’s existence. I’m sure there are some of you who actually like putting in catheters and are quite good at it, and while I will admit that an efficient line placement…
The dilemma: there are a subset of patients with some type of paraproteinemia–e.g., light chain deposition disease or amyloidosis, for instance–which are NEGATIVE by SPEP & UPEP. When there is renal involvement, the diagnosis can potentially be made…