Question: Who is the most important medical subspecialist for a patient with CKD to have regular contact with? Is it the nephrologist? A case could be made, relying purely on mortality statistics, that it’s actually the cardiologist. CKD/ESRD…
It can often be difficult to stop something once it’s been started; take statins for example. It seems that despite consistent evidence from two large, randomized controlled trails demonstrating the lack efficacy of statins for preventing cardiovascular mortality…
Heard an excellent presentation at our Renal Grand Rounds today by Dr. Charles O’Neill of Emory University, regarding the process of pathologic calcification in CKD/ESRD patients. One of the points I took away from this talk is that…
Quick one today: interesting article in a recent issue of C-JASN by Shantouf et al that demonstrates a link between serum alkaline phosphatase levels and vascular calcification in patients with ESRD. Briefly, the study examined 137 randomly-selected ESRD…
The presence of chronic kidney disease (CKD) portends a much higher mortality in patients who suffer an acute myocardial infarction. There are several potential reasons as to why this might be the case–for instance, the treatment of resultant…
The case against Sunday As A Day Of Rest For the Dialysis Unit: this older study (Bleyer et al, Kidney International 1999) looked at sudden death amongst ESRD patients according to days of the week using data from…
The Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (DOPPS) is an important longitudinal study of ESRD patients in multiple countries, and is the source of much respected epidemiologic data on dialysis patients worldwide. Interestingly, the DOPPS estimated the crude…
The rate of patients >75 years of age initiating dialysis has grown substantially in the U.S. over the past two decades. This has to do with several factors, including improvements in medical technology enabling people to live long…
A recent review in this month’s AJKD by Perl and Bargman describes the increasingly recognized importance of residual renal function in dialysis patients’ prognoses. Although the benefits of residual renal function are most obvious in patients undergoing peritoneal…
I heard a lecture not too long ago on atheroembolic renal disease which claimed that atheroembolic renal disease is to nephrology as sarcoidosis is to internal medicine. That is to say, it can present in a myriad of…
