Month: December 2009

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Cast Nephropathy and plasmapheresis

Does removal of the light chains with plasmapharesis reduce the severity of cast nephropathy? We know that renal failure is a terrible prognostic factor in multiple myeloma so fixing acute renal failure is important.

Renal failure comes in many different flavors with myeloma:

  • Light chain deposition disease
  • Heavy chain deposition disease that I have never seen but Steve Rankin had a case as a fellow.
  • Amylloidosis
  • Hypercalcemia
  • Cast nephropathy
Only the last is amenable to plasmapheresis. Whether it works has been the subject of three prospective randomized studies:

  1. Zucchelli 1988
  2. Johnson 1990
  3. Clark  2005 (PDF)
UPDATE

Though not randomized this recent article from KI should be of interest (Thanks Kyste):

Leung et al. Improvement of cast nephropathy with plasma exchange depends on the diagnosis and on reduction of serum free light chains. Kidney Int (2008) vol. 73 (11) pp. 1282-8.

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Fellow talk on sodium

I was scheduled to give a talk on disorders of sodium and water to the fellows yesterday. We have a particularly clever cohort of fellows this year and I really couldn’t give them a warmed over version of my resident and student sodium lecture so I put together this talk which looks five different issues with hyponatremia and some data regarding them:

  1. mannitol induced pseudohyponatremia
  2. TURP syndrome
  3. uremia and propensity for myelinolysis
  4. exercise induced hyponatemia
  5. differentiation of salt delpetion from SIADH with FENa, FEUrea and FE Uric acid with a couple of slides on treating SIADH with saline

Remember, downloading the native Keynote file will give you animations and a better  looking experience.