Meloney Oliveira, MD1st year fellow Division of Nephrology Rush University Medical Center *The patient history in this post is fictitious, but represents how a patient with these biopsy findings might present Case*: A 40-year-old with a 16-year history of heroin…
Rituximab, the monoclonal chimeric anti-CD20 antibody, is an effective B-Cell depleting agent and continues to gather data for its use in a wide range of conditions relevant for the Nephrologist. It was also a pre-season favourite in the…
The glomerular basement membrane is a thin layer of extracellular membrane proteins that is an important part of the filtration barrier, particularly glomerular permselectivity, by preventing proteins from crossing into the filtrate. The major proteins in the GBM…
Important new findings were recently published in relation to proteinuria and FSGS, which are definitely of interest to our community. First, the punch line: There is new evidence for a “circulating factor” in recurrent FSGS in a fascinating…
I was at the ASN Kidney Week in Philadelphia last week and I had the chance to check out some abstracts and discuss with the authors. Three abstracts called my attention right away. I uploaded a post a…
Mechanisms of edema formation in nephrotic syndrome (NS) are controversial. The traditional underfill hypothesis has come under heavy fire, and there are now many clinical and experimental observations that contradict it. The overfill hypothesis has now captured the…
Should patients with nephrotic syndrome (NS) be anticoagulated? Is there any level of proteinuria or albumin at which we should be especially concerned? The rates of venous thromboembolism (VTE) have ranged from 8-44% in observational studies and it…
This is the story of a 64 year old male mason with past medical history notable for hypertension and hyperlipidemia who was referred to me for evaluation of proteinuria. The patient noted onset of lower extremity edema nine…
Peter Mundel, a well-known researcher of podocyte biology, gave our Renal Grand Rounds today. Here’s what I took away from this morning’s talk: -regulation of the podocyte’s actin cytoskeleton is postulated to be the final common pathway in…
Take-home points from Mayo Clinic’s Fernando Fervenza’s excellent Renal Grand Rounds this morning, in which he addresses the potential use of rituximab as a treatment for membranous nephropathy: -the “rule of thirds” that we learn about membranous nephropathy (e.g.,…
