Tag Archives: Renal pathology/renal disease

May 2021—Forget about who’s buried in Grant’s Tomb (though for the record it’s Grant, his wife, and their dog). For laboratories, the deceptively simple question now under scrutiny is, What is estimated GFR? It is indeed an estimate, for starters—an approximation of glomerular filtration rate, which in turn is a physiological parameter that’s actually difficult to measure, says Greg Miller, PhD. Even so-called measured GFR values are not very precise in individual patients. It’s been carried along by several equations over the decades: Cockcroft-Gault, MDRD, and CKD-EPI, all of which (to the consternation of some) are still in use. It guides clinical care, including referrals to specialists and placement on kidney transplant lists, as well as dosing of medications such as metformin. Some call it a workhorse. But estimated GFR (eGFR) has also long been saddled with a race-based component, a coefficient that adjusts for better kidney function for Black patients compared with other patients.

July 2019—New from CAP Press is Medical Kidney Diseases—Morphology-Based Novel Approach to Renal Biopsy, by Huma Fatima, MD, assistant professor and director of the renal pathology laboratory, Department of Pathology, University of Alabama at Birmingham. It presents a simple and practical approach to renal biopsy by providing a pertinent differential diagnosis related to various patterns of injury involving renal parenchyma by light microscopy and reaching a correct diagnosis by assimilating immunofluorescence and electron microscopy findings. The 90-page book contains 66 cases, two of which we are reprinting here.