Exploring the onset of acute kidney injury during sepsis
In an earlier post I discussed the damage sepsis can do. It has been a focus of many of the projects I have been involved with for the past few years even though the group I am with is tasked with studying kidney disease. We are interested in sepsis because it is a major cause of acute kidney injury.
We do not yet know all the details of this link. Knowing exactly when kidney function falls after sepsis and what triggers the fall could be very important. It would help in developing clinical procedures and therapies to manage patients with sepsis at risk of acute kidney injury.
I recently published a study exploring one potential cause of falling kidney function during sepsis. The kidney filters the blood and removes excess fluid, solutes, and toxins from the body. The blood passes through the glomerulus where fluid can leak out. The volume at this stage is very large and includes many good things the body wants to keep. This fluid then passes through other specialized structures including the tubules where most of the fluid and useful solutes are re-absorbed. To prevent the body from losing too much fluid if the tubules are not working there is a feedback loop that stops the glomeruli producing filtrate.
Using a genetic model I tested whether this feedback loop is activated during sepsis. The results have just been published in the American Journal of Physiology. Renal Physiology.