Author: admin

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Kidometer is out!

For the last few months my partner and I have been working on an application for the iPhone. We finished it last week and now its available in the App Store!

The application is for pediatricians or any health professional who works with kids. Its called the Kidometer and it is a database of age-based normals. In pediatrics everything changes with age, from the normal range for alkaline phosphatase to the proper size of a laryngoscope blade to the appropriate advice to a parent to keep the tot safe. All of that information is available to the user of Kidometer instantly.

Chek out Kidometer.com for further details or better yet shoot us a few bucks by trying it out.

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Custom dialysate solutions

I get nervous when I need to dialyze someone who is severely hyponatremic. Dialysis has the power to change the sodium concentration very fast. Patients with chronic, compensated hyponatremia need their sodium corrected slowly. Experts recommend increasing the sodium by less than 12 mEq/L/day and to actually undertarget only 6 mEq/L/day to give you some margin for error.

Over the week-end we were consulted on a patient with a sodium of 106 and acute renal failure. By the time we were forced to dialyze the patient the sodium was up to 112. To do this safely we selected CVVHD and then diluted our dialysate down to 120 mEq/L.

Here is a Keynote (100 mb), PDF (155 kb) and a narrated version of that presentation (118 mb) where I walk through the algebra on how to mix a dialysate of any final sodium concentration.

The movie available for download is very high quality. Below is a YouTube conversion of that video to save you the 118 mb download.

This is some serious Sodium Jujitsu and I awarded my team the first Nephrology Merit Badge: Sodium Ninja (pages | pdf). Designed for Avery 5163 2×4 labels.

Nephrology Merit Badge, updated for the 21st century as a sticker for your iPad

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PBFluids breaks into the medical literature.

The first time PBFluids was referenced in the medical literature was in Matt Sparks’ article on nephrology internet resources.

Today I received an e-mail from Tom Oates. Apparently, when he is not researching the unique genetic predisposition of the WKY rat to crescentic glomerulonephritis he is an avid reader of both Hemodialysis International and PBFluids. He sent me this article in Hemodialysis International regarding the highest creatinine ever. The key sentence in the article:

Extremely high levels of serum creatinine have been reported in the literature.3 The highest level of serum creatinine reported was 37 mg/dL.3

So what is the highest previous creatinine reported in the literature? Well according to the author, Said Abuhasna, it’s 37 from this post at PBFluids. Nice to see blogs being included in the canon of medical literature. Though it would be even nicer if they spelled my name right.

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The death of MobileMe and a whole mess of broken links at PBFluids–Updated

One of the best stories about Steve Jobs was his tirade is response to the MobileMe disaster.

He gathered the MobileMe team together and asked,

“Can anyone tell me what MobileMe is supposed to do?”
Having received a satisfactory answer, he continues,
“So why the f*** doesn’t it do that?”

He then picked another executive to run the project on-the-spot. Ultimately, this resulted in the service being shuttered and replaced with iCloud.

I never had any problems with MobileMe; it always worked fine for me. However, I foolishly relied on it to host files for PBFluids. This includes all of the presentations and handouts that are the highest trafficked pages of the site. Well, MobileMe stopped accepting new subscriptions a year ago and as of June 30th the hosted files are no longer accessible. I have downloaded all of the material and will start re-uploading the files to DropBox.  The problem is rewiring all of the past links to the new file locations. This will take some time.

As I looked through the collection of files that used to be hosted at MobileMe I found a lot of journal articles and other copyrighted works. I have no idea how popular these links were but I remember when I uploaded them, PBFluids was a lonely backwater, where I was the sole source of traffic. I put the files the files online for my own use in teaching and on rounds. I don’t plan on replacing these files.

Update: 
7/3/12 Lecture tab is ported to DropBox
7/3/12 Handout tab is ported to DropBox through Adventures in Renal Imaging
7/5/12 Handout and Book tabs ported to DropBox
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July 3, first lecture of the year

For the past few years I have had the honor of giving the July 1st morning lecture for the internal medicine residents at St John Hospital and Medical Center. Unfortunately, July 1st was a Sunday and Monday mornings are dedicated to a formal sign out rounds in our division. So July 3rd was my first lecture.

I gave my Fluids, Diuretics and Sodium for the Terrified Intern lecture. You can down load it here:

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Twitter, kidney transplants and misinformation–Updated

Last week Indiana University (@IU_Health) live-tweeted a kidney transplant. They claimed it was the first unrelated-living-donor transplant Live tweeted.

It was dramatic and there was a lot of buzz among the kidney folk on Twitter about this. You can read some of the coverage here. It was exciting but it tasted too much like a publicity stunt for my taste. The counter argument, of course, is that raising the profile of living unrelated donors increases the likelihood that people will come forth and donate and I should just swallow my distaste and be supportive of the outreach effort.

We need more living donors.
We need more deceased donors.
We need more kidney donors.

As part of the Twitter publicity campaign, IU_health tweeted various facts about transplant. This one seemed wrong to me:

One every twenty minutes
Three an hour
Seventy-two a day
26,280 deaths a year 
That’s a lot
That’s too many
When I first read the tweet I read it as “1 American dies every 20 minutes waiting for a kidney transplant.” Twenty-six thousand deaths out of the ninety-thousand people on the wait list seemed like a very high mortality rate, higher than the dialysis morality rate. A quick check in the USRDS Atlas revealed the mortality rate to be only 7% on the wait list.
When I went back and read the tweet again I saw that they were talking about people waiting for all transplants. This seemed more than a bit disingenuous because when we encourage people to become living donors we are only talking about kidney transplants (in 2008 there were only 250 living partial liver transplants). I assume that IU is not encouraging living donors for hearts and lungs. 
In 2008 there was only 4,638 deaths among people waiting for a kidney transplant. For all organs it was only 7,182 deaths. These numbers are from Health Resources and Services Administration. Similar data can be found in USRDS Atlas Volume 2 Chapter 7 (PDF).
We need more kidney donors and social media is a great tool to unlock the thousands of spare kidneys Americans carry around with them but the great need does not justify spreading lies and misinformation.
Literally minutes after I posted this I received the following tweet:
Kudos for IU Health in coming clean. Also Hat tip to Sunny Gill, one of our first year fellows for finding the HRSA website.
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This is a very cool website

Endobible arranges a database of endocrine diseases in widely searchable manner. They lead physicians through the diagnosis, work-up and treatment of most endocrine diseases. They skip diabetes, but outside of that is looks awesome. Nice reminder that endocrine is more than diabetes.

I perused the Conn’s Syndrome section (primary hyperaldosteronism). The history and physical were great. The work-up was less impressive. They don’t advise saline loading and they still recommend stopping ACEi and beta-blockers before performing a Aldo Renin Ratio. Good luck keeping a resistant hypertension patient from stroking while you wash all those drugs out for 4 weeks.

Overall a clever design and great resource.

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Lupus nephritis, MMF and maintenance therapy

I love it when I have a clinical question and I’m able to find a well executed study that’s exactly fits my question. It’s like fitting the last piece of a puzzle.

A year ago I was referred a patient with heavy proteinuria. Initial assessment showed 7 grams of proteinuria, a cholesterol over 300, edema and an albumin of 0.7. Classic nephrotic syndrome.

Before he returned for his first follow-up appointment disaster struck. He developed chest pain and shortness of breath from a pulmonary embolism. This was a patient my age, two kids, professional. Looking at him was like looking in the mirror, but for the grace of G-d that could be me sitting in that exam chair.

black arrow points to tubuloreticular inclusions
seen in SLE and HIV.

After a month of anti-coagulation I was able to convince pulmonology and hematology to reverse the Coumadin for a few hours to get a kidney biopsy. It was membranous nephropathy with endothelial tubuloreticular inclusions. Along with consistent ANA and DS DNA we made a diagnosis of SLE WHO V and began mycophenolate mofetil. We titrated the MMF up to 3g a day and after 6 months he was in remission.

After a few months of sub nephrotic proteinuria, a normal albumin and a year of anti-coagulation he stopped his Coumadin. He has weaned his prednisone to 10 mg every other day and stopped the alendronate and rosuvastatin. Now he wants to get off the mycophenolate. Given how frightening the PE was, my preference would be to treat him forever. I casually surveyed my peers and got answers as varied as:

  • I never lower the MMF, every time I do the patient relapses
  • I taper it off after 6 months of remission

When I consulted the literature to look into this I found this paper:

Bingo. They maintained patients on MMF for 3 years at 2 grams a day with excellent results. 

Importantly there were no deaths, only 10% had serious infections and no cases of cancer occurred with the mycophenolate. 
Looks like an acceptably benign therapy with good outcomes.
Aside: While looking up how to spell endothelial tubuloreticular inclusions, I came across this paper (how I love you so Google) showing a significant number of patients with endothelial tubuloreticular inclusions that did not have lupus or HIV. I was taught that these EM findings were essentially pathognomonic for lupus. Interesting.
UPDATE: a second trial, the MAINTAIN trial (PDF), showed almost identical results. Included for completeness.