New Research on Acute Kidney Disease Shows Predictive Findings for CKD in Pediatric Solid Organ Transplants

In a new paper published in October in the journal Pediatric Transplantation, a multidisciplinary research team from UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh found that pediatric non-kidney transplantation patients who have acute kidney disease are at an increased risk for progression to chronic kidney disease. Up to this point there was no definitive data on the subject in pediatric transplant patients. UPMC Children’s Division of Pediatric Nephrology researcher Dana Y. Fuhrman, DO, MS, was the senior author of the study.

The retrospective study conducted by the UPMC Children’s team examined all non-kidney solid organ transplants conducted at the hospital between 2011 and 2019 (n=338).

Within the patient cohort, 13% were found to have acute kidney disease (AKD), and AKD was associated with developing chronic kidney disease. Whereas 37.9% of the study cohort were diagnosed with an acute kidney injury (AK), having a severe grade AKI was found not to be associated with CKD. However, having a stage 3 AKI was found to correlate independently with having AKD.

The teams findings suggest that having acute kidney disease in the setting of pediatric solid organ non-kidney transplants may be a better indicator than using AKI status to predict a patient’s risk of future development or conversion to chronic kidney disease.

Read the full study and results at the reference below.

Reference

Patel M, Heipertz A, Joyce E, Kellum JA, Horvat C, Squires JE, West SC, Priyanka P, Fuhrman DY. Acute Kidney Disease Predicts Chronic Kidney Disease in Pediatric Non-Kidney Solid Organ Transplant Patients. Pediatric Transplantation. 2021 Oct 20; E14172. Online ahead of print.

More About Dr. Fuhrman

Dana Y. Fuhrman, DO, MS, is an assistant professor of Critical Care Medicine and Pediatrics at the University of Pittsburgh School of Medicine. She is an attending physician in the Division of Pediatric Nephrology at UPMC Children’s Hospital of Pittsburgh, and she also currently serves as the associate program director of the Pediatric Critical Care Medicine Fellowship.

Dr. Fuhrman’s research interests are in the areas of AKI and continuous renal replacement therapy. Currently, her research focus is in the prevention and early detection of AKI in children. She is interested in studying renal reserve as defined by the difference in a baseline and a protein stimulated glomerular filtration rate. Dr. Fuhrman’s work seeks to better understand how children with lower renal reserve values are at a greater risk for AKI after cardiac surgery. Her work also involves investigations of cell cycle arrest biomarkers, tissue inhibitor of metalloproteinases-2 and insulin-like growth factor binding protein 7, as a means to predict AKI risk and diagnosis the condition earlier.

Learn more about Dr. Fuhrman’s training and recent published research.