American Society of Nephrology, Nov. 4 to 7

The annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology was held virtually this year from Nov. 4 to 7 and attracted participants from around the world, including nephrology specialists, researchers, scientists, and other health care professionals. The conference featured presentations focusing on the latest advances in the management of patients with kidney diseases and related disorders.

In one study, Pietro Manuel Ferraro, M.D., Ph.D., of Università Cattolica del Sacro Cuore in Milan and Brigham and Women’s Hospital in Boston, and colleagues found that certain factors predispose men to a higher risk for developing kidney stones than women.

The authors analyzed data from three large prospective U.S. cohorts: the Health Professionals Follow-up Study and the Nurses’ Health Study I and II. The final analysis included data from 268,553 adults, of whom 10,302 developed a first kidney stone over time. The researchers confirmed that gender plays a role in the development of kidney stones.

“Certain factors explain at least part of the higher risk of stones among men, including differences in waist circumference, fluid intake, and especially urine composition, [which] explained a meaningful proportion of the excess risk among men,” Ferraro said. “Since modifiable risk factors play a role in the excess risk of kidney stones among men, we can expect that vigorously tackling those factors would result in a reduction in the rate of stone formation.”

Press Release

Ivonne H. Schulman, M.D., of the National Institutes of Health in Bethesda, Maryland, and colleagues found that a hospital admission with an acute kidney injury (AKI) diagnosis is an independent risk factor for multiple adverse patient outcomes within 90 days and one year after discharge for patients with and without preexisting chronic kidney disease (CKD).

The authors used a large database of claims and laboratory data for patients with private insurance to study a demographically and geographically diverse population in the United States. All AKI hospitalizations between January 2007 and September 2020 with more than two years of continuous enrollment free of AKI hospitalization were identified (594,509 patients) from the Optum database. These patients were propensity score-matched (for age, sex, race/ethnicity, preexisting CKD, and preexisting heart failure) to 594,509 control patients who were hospitalized for a non-AKI cause. The researchers found a higher cumulative incidence of all-cause rehospitalizations and death from the time of discharge to 90 days and one year after discharge in patients with a first AKI event, with or without preexisting CKD, compared with matched patients without AKI, with or without CKD.