Active clinical trials for "Kidney Diseases"

Low-value care is defined as patient care that provides no net benefit to patients in specific clinical scenarios, and can cause patient harm. Prior research has documented high-rates of low-value care in Virginia; this work has helped to inspire a Virginia government-sponsored quality improvement initiative to reduce low-value care. Funded by an Arnold Ventures grant, six large health systems in Virginia volunteered to partner with the Virginia Center for Health Innovation (VCHI) to reduce use of nine low-value health services (three preoperative testing measures, two cardiac screening measures, one diagnostic eye imaging measure, one low-back pain opioid measure, one low-back pain imaging measure and one peripherally inserted central catheter [PICC] measure). These health systems include nearly 7000 clinicians practicing across more than 1000 sites. VCHI is implementing a nonrandomized physician peer-comparison feedback quality improvement intervention to reduce use of nine low-value services. Modeling will be used to identify and use propensity score matching to match six intervention health systems to six comparable control health systems. VCHI will provide education, quality improvement training and financial resources to each site, and VCHI will use the Milliman MedInsight Health Waste Calculator to create the peer comparison reports using the Virginia All Payer Claims Database (APCD). VCHI will use additional measures from The Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality (AHRQ). Additionally, VCHI will use AHRQ data to attribute physicians and health care facilities to health systems. The primary purpose of the initiative is to improve quality of care for Virginia residents and this initiative is not being done for research purposes. Nevertheless, University of California, Los Angeles (UCLA) plans to rigorously study and publish the impact of this intervention across the state of Virginia, which is why the UCLA team pre-registered the initiative. The UCLA team will use the Virginia APCD to evaluate the impact of the intervention. Please note: the APCD has a 1-year time-lag of data collection and is a dynamic database, meaning that its population of enrollees changes from year to year. This intervention was initially designed as a randomized step-wedge intervention; the intervention was delayed by the COVID-19 pandemic and began in September 2020 for all intervention groups. The intervention period was extended through December 2022. As a result, the initial design was modified.

The purpose of this study is to determine whether patients with autosomal dominant polycystic kidney disease (ADPKD) present with abnormal endothelial function, increased levels of NOX4 activity and mitochondrial abnormalities, contributing to oxidative stress from early stages that correlate with disease severity.

Individuals on dialysis due to kidney failure have very prescriptive diets. These diets help increase dialysis effectiveness and help patients control blood levels of electrolytes including potassium and phosphate, acid-base balance, blood pressure, and fluid between dialysis treatments. However, patient compliance with these diets often can be very low, and one reason for this low compliance is disguesia (abnormal taste sensations) which can make the diets unpalatable. This experiment tests the hypothesis that disguesia, and subsequent lack of adherence to a dialysis friendly diet, is a result of either vascular taste (tasting your own blood through the basolateral side of taste cells) or altered chemical composition of saliva in between dialysis appointments. However, to study these hypotheses, data are needed on the types of substances that may contribute to the disguesia. Substances for which the concentration is influenced by kidney function (in healthy people) or dialysis (in patients) are the prime candidates for the disguesia under our hypotheses. Thus, this experiment tests whether taste or flavours experienced from sodium, calcium, potassium, creatinine, urea, phosphates, glutamate, and iron may be related to altered taste experienced by patients on dialysis.

Salt (NaCl) intake is implicated in causing hypertension and cardiovascular disease, the commonest cause of death worldwide. The investigators recently established that Na+ is stored in tissues, bound to glycosaminoglycans (GAGs) in skin and muscle. The resulting local hypertonicity leads to immune cell-driven induction of local tissue electrolyte clearance via modulation of cutaneous lymph capillary density. To visualize these complex processes in man directly, the investigators established Na+ magnetic resonance imaging (23Na-MRI) and investigated Na+ stores in hemodialysis (HD) patients. Hemodialysis patients were sodium-"overloaded" and HD treatment lowered tissue Na+ stores in this study. The observed effects were highly variable and independent of Na+ or water removal from the body during a dialysis session. Tissue Na+ mobilization correlated with circulating vascular endothelial growth factor-C (VEGF-C). The investigators believe that excessive Na+ storage is a reversible condition and therefore susceptible for therapeutic interventions. The investigators hypothesize that lowering dialysate Na+ concentration may favorably affect accelerated tissue Na+ accumulation in hemodialysis patients. Besides, improved tissue Na+ storage, osmostress-induced as well as pro-inflammatory immune cell response should be affected by such a revised dialysis management.

Studying whether Klotho and FGF23 have a role in UP and whether their expression change by BB-UVB with the improvement of pruritus.

In this study, the investigators aimed to observe the effects of medium cut-off dialysis filters and high-flux dialysis filters on malnutrition inflammation score, uremic itching, restless leg syndrome, anemia, and ESA treatment, which are prominent complications in hemodialysis, and routine follow-up parameters.

Hyperphosphatemia is a common problem among patientens suffering from chronic kidney disease. Hyperphosphatemia is associated with increased risk of cardiovascular diseases. One of the treatments are through the diet, where patients are instructed ind reducing their daily intake of phosphate. But since phosphate exists in both organic and inorganic forms in the diet, this leads to several problems. Informations of the bioavability and furthermore the effect of plasma koncentrations of phosphate are lacking for both forms of phosphate.

The studies included the effect of chronic kidney disease advancement on the accumulation of oxidative stress markers in plasma. In patients with end-stage renal disease, the effect of replacement therapy was also assessed. Therefore, the patient with chronic kidney disease was evaluated divided into three groups (chronic kidney disease at stage G3b-G4, peritoneal dialysis, hemodialysis). In addition, changes in the interrelationship between oxidative modifications, carbonyl and nitrogen stress, and the carbamylation resulting from the progression of kidney disease have been taken into account. This issue is related to the assessment of whether the protein modification types differentiate patients depending on the stage of chronic kidney disease and the method of renal replacement therapy. Protein modifications associated with oxidative stress are a part of the complications resulting from chronic kidney diseases, such as malnutrition, chronic inflammation, dyslipidemia, iron disorder, and calcium and phosphate disorders. Also, diseases of atherosclerosis aetiology are much higher frequency in patients with chronic kidney disease than in those with normal kidney function. Therefore, in the studies presented here, particular attention was paid to the effect of oxidative stress on chronic kidney disease complications in the aspect of cardiovascular damage. The specificity of atherosclerosis in patients with chronic kidney disease was evaluated by comparing groups of this type of patients with patients with ischemic heart diseases and normal renal function.

In this observational study, data from the recent past of patients with type 2 diabetes mellitus and chronic kidney disease will be studied. Type 2 diabetes mellitus (T2DM) is a condition in which the body does not make enough of a hormone called insulin or does not use insulin well. This results in high blood sugar levels. About half of people with T2DM also have a condition called chronic kidney disease (CKD). In people with CKD, the kidneys' ability to work as how it should decreases over time. In this study, researchers want to learn more about the CKD in T2DM patients in Alberta, Canada. This will help them to know the chances to improve the care of these patients. The researchers will look at the health information from adult men and women in Alberta who were diagnosed with T2DM before 2018 and visited a doctor to have check-ups in 2018. They will find out about how many of these people had CKD and how severe their CKD was. The researchers will collect data about the age and gender of these patients, how long they had T2DM and if they had other related medical problems. The researchers will also learn how these patients were treated based on their kidney condition and how much money was spent on these treatments. This study will collect information from the health records of about 270,000 patients with T2DM who were living in Alberta, Canada. This information will come from the Alberta Kidney Disease Network (AKDN) database. Besides this data collection, no further tests or examinations are planned in this study.

Chronic kidney disease (CKD) is defined as persistent abnormalities of kidney structure or function for more than 3 months leading to a sustained reduction in glomerular filtration rate (GFR) and/or to the occurrence of kidney damage markers, such as albuminuria. [1] CKD is an emerging global public health problem, having significant morbidity and mortality costs on society. It is considered as an important component of the epidemic of non-communicable diseases in developed, as well as low-income/middle-income countries. [2] In the Kingdom of Saudi Arabia, CKD has been established as a major health issue in recent decades due to the growing incidence and prevalence of end stage kidney disease (ESKD) among the Saudi population. The overall prevalence of CKD was 5.7% in 2010. [3] In 2017, there were around two million cases of CKD and 3818 deaths due to CKD in Saudi Arabia in 2017. [4] A recent study also reported the overall prevalence of CKD stages 3 to 5 was 4.4% among the Saudi population. [5] The major consequences of CKD include disease progression and, subsequently, increased risk of cardiovascular disease.