A small absolute change in serum creatinine level, 0.3 mg/dl, is used by Acute Kidney Injury Network (AKIN) and Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO) guidelines to define the presence of Acute Kidney Injury (AKI). The base of…
Nephrologists have been looking for sensitive biomarkers to predict AKI. Efforts have been made and the idea of “renal angina” was proposed by Goldstein and Chawla in 2010, but still there has been no reliable biomarker commercially available…
Although I don’t believe that many will agree that this was the most important paper of the year in the world of nephrology, I do want to give a shout out to a paper published in JCI in…
Cystatin C has been proposed as an alternative marker of kidney function and studies have shown that CyC is a better predictor of mortality that serum creatinine. Although, when first introduced, it was thought that CyC was not…
This month’s eJournal club concerns biomarkers of AKI. There has been considerable interest in developing novel biomarkers of AKI and CKD and a lot of effort has been focused on novel biomarkers such as NGAL, KIM-1 and IL-18….
One of the frequent situations that we face in the renal transplant clinic is the patient in otherwise good condition who presents with a slight rise in serum creatinine. Although this is sometimes due to reversible causes, such…
The quest for biomarkers to accurately diagnose AKI is often analogized to ACS/myocardial infarction. Thus we have dubbed AKI biomarker investigation the “search for our troponin,” with the goal of facilitating early and accurate diagnosis of AKI that…
As we all know, there are significant limitations to the use of creatinine as an estimate of GFR. Creatinine is freely filtered at the glomerulus, but in addition is also secreted to some degree, meaning that creatinine clearance…
Two recent articles in JASN–one by Siew et al and the other by Paragas et al–provide further support to the idea of using urinary NGAL as a biomarker for acute kidney injury. An accompanying editorial by Lynda Szczech,…
Traditionally surgeons have relied on a well-honed abdominal exam, combined with abdominal imaging usually in the form of an iv-contrast CT scan, to make the diagnosis of acute appendicitis. Nevertheless, there remain significant instances of “false negatives” (usually…
