If you’ve never heard the biochemical sleuthwork involved in the legal case of Patricia Stallings, it’s definitely worth reading about: a good summary of the case can be found here. Briefly, it involves a St. Louis-area woman who,…
One of the more common (and potentially successful) suicide attempts is to drink a bunch of antifreeze, which contains ethylene glycol. As we all know, this is typically diagnosed by characteristic lab abnormalities: patients present initially with an…
As you may recall, macroglossia (an enlarged tongue) is one of the many manifestations of amyloidosis, the systemic disorder in which a particular protein is deposited as Congo-red positive aggregations. You may also recall that amyloidosis can be…
Changes in the regulation of serum osmolarity is just one of the many chances that occurs during the normal physiologic response to pregnancy. Beginning with the first trimester, the plasma osmolarity level, serum Na, and osmolarity thresholds for…
One of the major side effects of cyclophosphamide (Cytoxan) in both men and women is gonadal failure and resultant infertility. While there is markedly less risk with the doses typically used for the treatment of glomerular disease than,…
Here’s a very brief overview of the kidneys of animals (other than humans). All vertebrates have kidneys and the functional unit of the kidney in all species is the nephron. Freshwater fish–like the zebrafish–have a kidney which is kind…
A very significant percentages of ESRD patient admissions derive from clotted dialysis access–the “lifeline” dialysis patients require in order to survive on dialysis. Any maneuver or treatment which is successful in preventing, or even delaying, access thrombosis would…
One of the rare (but potentially underdiagnosed) causes of anion gap metabolic acidosis is acquired 5-oxoprolinuria due to excessive Tylenol ingestion. To explain how this works, you need to familiarize yourself briefly with the gamma-glutamyl cycle, a series…
A recent paper in the most recent issue of JASN by Louvar et al asks the “nature versus nurture” question of deceased donor kidney transplants. Using data from the US Renal Data System (USRDS), the investigators looked at…
If a picture is worth a thousand words, then a movie is worth a thousand pictures, right? What is this video of exactly? This elegant work comes from the lab of Frank Costantini and colleagues at Columbia University,…