Low serum sodium concentration is a prognostic factor related to current blood glucose level in stable hemodialysis patients : an observational study

Background: A lot of risk factors for mortality have been proposed in hemodialysis patients. However, most of the findings were derived from the analyses using all of the hemodialysis patients. What we really want to know is the prognostic factor in stable hemodialysis patients who have good activities of daily living, because it is difficult to estimate their prognosis by physical appearance. Methods: This is a 7-year observational study. The study involved registering 631 patients who had undergone hemodialysis for more than 1 year at enrollment and were still alive more than 1 year after it. Demographic and clinical data were collected to analyze the relationship with mortality. Moreover, the patients were age-stratified to investigate age-dependent prognostic factors. Results: Low serum sodium concentration is an independent risk factor for all-cause and cardiovascular mortality common to a wide range of ages in stable hemodialysis patients. Causes of hyponatremia included the predialysis blood glucose level as well as the variables related to nutrition, inflammation, and fluid overload. Conclusions: Low serum sodium concentration is a significant prognostic factor in stable hemodialysis patients. Low serum sodium concentration can be a clue to finding current poor glucose control in stable hemodialysis patients. Predialysis blood glucose level is one of the representative factors correlated with serum sodium concentration

IVC diameter in patients undergoing HD

Background : IVC diameter on expiration (IVCdexp) is measured by echocardiography routinely. It is used to estimate volume status and designated as a definitive marker for determining dry weight (DW) in patients undergoing hemodialysis (HD). Methods : A cross-sectional study. Outpatients (n = 107), and inpatients (n = 35) undergoing HD were enrolled. IVCdexp was measured on non-dialysis days in outpatients and dialysis days before and after the dialysis session in inpatients. In outpatients, the relationship of IVCdexp with echocardiography findings and clinical characteristics was analyzed. IVCdexp was compared with the other DW markers as a predictive factor for intradialytic hypotension. In inpatients, IVCdexp was analyzed by dividing inpatients with or without fluid in extravascular space. Results : IVCdexp ranged from 5.4 to 16.9 mm in outpatients who had optimal DW. IVCdexp could reflect on volume status, but not predictive for intradialytic hypotension and not suggestive of fluid in extravascular space. Conclusions : IVCdexp was a rough marker to estimate volume status and only useful in suggesting apparent hypervolemia or hypovolemia. We should know that the IVCdexp value is affected by a lot of factors and not a definitive marker for estimating practical DW

Successful treatment of highly advanced immunoglobulin G4-related kidney disease presenting renal mass-like regions with end-stage kidney failure : a case study

Background: Immunoglobulin G4-related kidney disease characterized by immunoglobulin G4-positive plasma cell-rich tubulointerstitial nephritis has distinctive serological and radiological findings. Renal prognosis is good because of a good response to glucocorticoids. Here we report a case of successful treatment of highly advanced immunoglobulin G4-related kidney disease presenting renal mass-like regions with end-stage kidney failure. Case Presentation: A 59-year-old Japanese man was referred to our hospital because of uremia with a creatinine level of 12.36 mg/dL. Urinalysis revealed mild proteinuria and hyperβ2microglobulinuria, and blood tests showed hyperglobulinemia with an IgG level of 3243 mg/dL and an IgG4 level of 621 mg/dL. Non-contrast computed tomography revealed renal mass-like regions. Based on the findings, immunoglobulin G4-related kidney disease was suspected, however, further radiological examination showed unexpected results. Ga-67 scintigraphy showed no kidney uptake. T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging revealed high-intensity signals which corresponded to mass-like regions and multiple patchy low-intensity signals in kidney cortex. Finally, the patient was diagnosed with immunoglobulin G4-related kidney disease by renal pathology of severe immunoglobulin G4-positive plasma cellrich tubulointerstitial nephritis and characteristic fibrosis. He received 50 mg oral prednisolone, which was tapered with a subsequent decrease of serum creatinine and IgG4 levels. One year after initiation of treatment, he achieved normalization of serum IgG4 level and proteinuria, and remained off dialysis with a creatinine level of 3.50 mg/dL. After treatment with steroids, repeat imaging suggested bilateral severe focal atrophy. However, mass-like regions did not show atrophic change although renal atrophy was evident in patchy low-intensity lesions on T2-weighted magnetic resonance imaging. These findings suggest that multiple patchy low-intensity signals and high-intensity mass-like regions were mildly atrophic lesions of immunoglobulin G4-related kidney disease due to severe fibrosis and normal parts of kidney, respectively. Conclusions: In immunoglobulin G4-related kidney disease with severe kidney failure, radiological findings should be carefully examined. In addition, renal prognosis may be good despite highly advanced tubulointerstitial nephritis and fibrosis

Importance of pre pump arterial pres sure monitoring in hemodialysis patients

Pre-pump arterial pressure (PreAP) is monitored to avoid generating excessive negative pressure. National Kidney Foundation K/DOQI clinical practice guidelines for vascular access recommend that PreAP should not fall below-250 mmHg because excessive negative PreAP can lead to a decrease in the delivery of blood flow, inadequate dialysis, and hemolysis. Nonetheless, these recommendations are consistently disregarded in clinical practice and pressure sensors are often removed from the dialysis circuit.Thus far,delivered blood flow has been reported to decrease at values more negative than -150 mmHg of PreAP. These values have been analyzed by an ultrasonic flowmeter and not directly measured. Furthermore, no known group has evaluated whether PreAP-induced hemolysis occurs at a particular threshold. Therefore, the aim of this study was to clarify the importance of PreAP in the prediction of inadequate dialysis and hemolysis. By using different diameter needles, human blood samples from healthy volunteers were circulated in a closed dialysis circuit. The relationship between PreAP and delivered blood flow or PreAP and hemolysis was investigated. We also investigated the optimal value for PreAP using several empirical monitoring methods, such as a pressure pillow. Our investigation indicated that PreAP is a critical factor in the determination of delivered blood flow and hemolysis,both of which occured at pressure values more negative than -150 mmHg. With the exception of direct pressure monitoring, commonly used monitoring methods for PreAP were determined to be ineffective. We propose that the use of a vacuum monitor would permit regular measurement of PreAP

Urinary Exosomal WT1 in Diabetic Nephropathy

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is the major cause of end-stage renal failure and is associated with increased morbidity and mortality as compared to other causes of renal disease. Albuminuria is often the first clinical indicator of the presence of DN. However, albuminuria or proteinuria is a common symptom in patients with various renal disorders. Therefore, specific biomarkers for the diagnosis of DN are required. A primary hallmark of DN is the progressive damage and death of glomerular podocytes, resulting in the leaking of proteins into the urine. Urinary exosomes released by podocytes are microvesicles containing information of the originated cells. Podocyte-derived signal transduction factors (PDSTFs) are good candidates to assess podocyte injuries. The profile of PDSTFs in urinary exosomes from patients with DN is different from that from patients with minimal change nehrotic syndrome. In addition, PDSTFs molecules in exosomes were derived from primary murine podocytes under high glucose conditions. Among PDSTFs in urinary exosomes, Wilms tumor 1 (WT1) levels reflected damage of diabetic glomeruli in the patients. Urinary exosomal WT1 can predict the decline in eGFR for the following several years. In conclusion, urinary exosomal WT1 is a useful biomarker to improve risk stratification in patients with DN

Large expert-curated database for benchmarking document similarity detection in biomedical literature search

Document recommendation systems for locating relevant literature have mostly relied on methods developed a decade ago. This is largely due to the lack of a large offline gold-standard benchmark of relevant documents that cover a variety of research fields such that newly developed literature search techniques can be compared, improved and translated into practice. To overcome this bottleneck, we have established the RElevant LIterature SearcH consortium consisting of more than 1500 scientists from 84 countries, who have collectively annotated the relevance of over 180 000 PubMed-listed articles with regard to their respective seed (input) article/s. The majority of annotations were contributed by highly experienced, original authors of the seed articles. The collected data cover 76% of all unique PubMed Medical Subject Headings descriptors. No systematic biases were observed across different experience levels, research fields or time spent on annotations. More importantly, annotations of the same document pairs contributed by different scientists were highly concordant. We further show that the three representative baseline methods used to generate recommended articles for evaluation (Okapi Best Matching 25, Term Frequency-Inverse Document Frequency and PubMed Related Articles) had similar overall performances. Additionally, we found that these methods each tend to produce distinct collections of recommended articles, suggesting that a hybrid method may be required to completely capture all relevant articles. The established database server located at https://relishdb.ict.griffith.edu.au is freely available for the downloading of annotation data and the blind testing of new methods. We expect that this benchmark will be useful for stimulating the development of new powerful techniques for title and title/abstract-based search engines for relevant articles in biomedical research.Peer reviewe