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…
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…
