A study carried out by researchers at Johns Hopkins Medicine, in the United States, found that certain molecules present in urine and blood can help predict the risk of developing chronic kidney disease.
“About 20% of hospitalized patients develop acute kidney injury and have a three to eight times greater risk of developing chronic kidney disease later in life,” says Chirag Parikh, director of the Division of Nephrology at the Johns Hopkins University School of Medicine. and author of the study.
The researchers noted that there was an increased incidence of kidney injury at the university hospital.
“We set out to understand progression to chronic kidney disease and whether monitoring these patients over time can give us clues about the progression of kidney disease,” says Parikh.
The research, published in the Journal of Clinical Investigation, involved 656 patients hospitalized with acute kidney injury and analyzed seven urinary biomarkers and two plasma biomarkers of kidney injury.
From this, scholars began to assess the longitudinal changes of these biomarkers according to the progression of the lesion to chronic disease.
They could see that for each deviation there was an increase in changes in KIM-1 and MCP-1 and TNFRI biomarkers over 12 months of follow-up.
Such changes were associated with a two to three times greater risk of developing chronic kidney disease.
According to Parikh, these findings suggest that tissue damage and inflammation, as well as a slower restoration of vascular health, would be associated with a greater risk of progression to chronic kidney disease.
However, they also noted that increasing the urinary biomarker Umod (uromodulin) was associated with a 40% reduction in the risk of chronic kidney disease.
“Longitudinal measurement of some of these proteins can help control the treatment of patients with acute kidney injury after hospital discharge, which entails follow-up with a nephrologist, optimization of medications for diabetes and heart problems, and accurate dosing of all medications with kidney function. reduced”, concludes the author, who alleges that the discovery will help in understanding the progression of the lesion to chronic disease.
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