The Panel 7: I remember it was one of the first things I learned in clinical medicine. Na, K, Cl, HCO3, BUN, creatinine and glucose. I know not all countries use the same “grid format” of presenting these…
Hope everybody is having a happy holiday season–even those nephrology fellows (not myself, fortunately) who are required to staff the dialysis unit in lieu of spending time with family and friends. An unusual cause of acute kidney injury…
Renal vein thrombosis is a thrombotic occlusion of one or both renal veins. Its most common cause is nephrotic syndrome, which is a hypercoaguable state though to be due at least in part to loss of the anticoagulant…
At the Brigham and Women’s Hospital & the Dana Farber Cancer Institute, there is an ongoing trial of using pneumonectomy and injected, heated cisplatin into the pleural space for patients with malignant mesothelioma, a condition with an overall…
One of the earliest time-saving tricks I learned as a Nephrology fellow was to always ask the covering housestaff to have a specimen of piping hot urine waiting for me at the time of the initial consult: I…
The M3 subtype of acute myelogenous leukemia–also known as acute promyelocytic leukemia–is one of the most responsive forms of leukemia, as the addition of all-trans retinoic acid (ATRA) is known to overcome the maturation block in affected lymphocytes. While…
The case: a 60 year-old woman with a history of metastatic ovarian cancer who presents with a markedly tense, distended abdomen and acute-on-chronic kidney injury, with a Cr which had risen from 1.4 mg/dL to 4.5 mg/dL and…
There is a patient now on the renal consult service with Churg-Strauss Syndrome. This disease falls under the category of “small vessel vasculitis” and most commonly is thought of as a pulmonary disease, as the characteristic triad consists…
It has long been known that acute phosphate toxicity–as might be seen in rhabdomyolysis or tumor lysis syndrome–can lead to acute kidney injury as a result of calcium-phosphate deposition in the renal parenchyma and tubules. Interestingly, this problem…
The study of acute kidney injury has been hampered by a lack of a standard definition. Some of this is semantics–for instance, the decision to change “acute renal failure” to “acute kidney injury” does nothing to help in…
