Chronic kidney disease - causes, symptoms, diagnosis, treatment, pathology

Chronic kidney disease is a broad term that includes subtle decreases in kidney function

that develop over a minimum of three months.

In contrast, acute kidney injury refers to any deterioration in kidney function that

happens in less than three months.

Now the kidney’s job is to regulate what’s in the blood, so they might remove waste,

or make sure electrolyte levels are steady, or regulate the overall amount of water, and

even make hormones - the kidneys do a lot of stuff!

Blood gets into the kidney through the renal artery, and once inside it goes gets into

tiny clumps of arterioles called glomeruli where it’s initially filtered, and the filtrate

which is the stuff that gets filtered out, moves into the renal tubule.

The rate at which this filtration takes place is known as glomerular filtration rate or

GFR.

In a normal healthy person, this is somewhere around 100-120 milliliter of fluid filtered

per minute per 1.73 m2 of body surface area.

The value is slightly less in women than men and it decreases slowly in all of us as we

grow older.

One of the most common causes of chronic kidney disease is hypertension.

In hypertension, the walls of arteries supplying the kidney begin to thicken in order to withstand

the pressure, and that results in a narrow lumen.

A narrow lumen means less blood and oxygen gets delivered to the kidney, resulting in