BACKGROUND INFORMATION

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Acute renal failure (ARF) is a sudden loss of kidney function. This may be due to many different causes, such as a severe decrease in blood flow, damage to kidneys from medication, infection, disease or injury, or blockage of urine flowing out of kidneys. Some symptoms are lack of appetite, swelling, little or no urine produced, nausea and vomiting. Mortality rate of those who have acute kidney injury and thus require renal replacement therapy is 50-70%. This is due to a cascade of events from the renal failure that affects multiorgan failure and death. Advances in hemodialysis and hemofiltration therapy and pathophysiology have not effectively decreased this rate in the last few decades. Alternative improvements must be made to see success.

Damage to the kidney is especially major in the proximal tubule cells. The ability to excrete water and solutes is lost, but this can be replaced by dialysis. What dialysis cannot replace is the reclamation, metabolic, and endocrine functions of the organ. There may also be immunoregulatory function loss. These abilities of the kidney stem from the mechanisms of and within the cells and cannot easily be reproduced by a machine. Some type of replacement therapy of the proximal tubule cells could then possibly repair these lost functions and be used combination with dialysis.


Website by David Dyer | UC Irvine BME240 | last updated 06/12/2009