Fontiers in Kidney Medicine and Biology

Join Dr. Peter Kotanko, MD, FASN, Head of Biomedical Evidence Generation and Renal Research Institute, and John Daugirdas, MD, FACP, FASN, Clinical Professor of Medicine at the University of Illinois School of Medicine at Chicago, as they discuss aspects around dialysis patient prescription.

This session will discuss the principles of early vascular aging in chronic kidney disease. We will also discuss what we can learn from the animal kingdom in order to identify novel opportunities to slow down the aging process in humans with the burden of lifestyle diseases. We will also discuss the role of and identification of biomarkers of biological age

This session will be a discussion about hemodialysis, one of the main treatments for kidney failure, but also a treatment that can have adverse consequences. Some of these relate to the stress that dialysis can exert on the cardiovascular system, which in turn affects the delivery of blood to different organs. We will discuss how this happens, what it means for patients, and what can be done to address this.

This episode will discuss the use of mathematical modeling and computations to gain insights into the pandemic in order to provide effective intervention measures and to understand the drivers of the contagion among kidney patients.

In this episode of Frontiers in Kidney Medicine & Biology, Dr. Peter Kotanko, Research Director at Renal Research Institute is joined by Dr. Fokko Pieter Wieringa, PhD, Principal Scientist at IMEC in The Netherlands as they address what pervasive sensing is (including some examples), as well as go into the opportunities and risk of pervasive sensing. If time allows, we will discuss in what direction pervasive sensing may be going.

In this episode, Dr. Peter Kotanko is joined by Dr. Roberto Pecoit-Filho, Senior Research Scientist from the Arbor Research Collaborative for Health, to discuss the differences between anemia in the general population and in patients with kidney disease. We also discuss the current understanding of the mechanisms behind CKD anemia and the perspective of the introduction of new treatment options and an expansion in the understanding of the pathophysiology.

In this session, the pathophysiology of hypoxemia and hypoxia in patients on dialysis will be discussed, as well as the mechanisms by which these phenomena are related to adverse outcomes. The maladaptive responses in patients on dialysis will be discussed in the context of comparative physiology, with the example of Sherpa, which shows a highly adaptive response to ambient hypoxia. It will also be discussed how lessons from comparative physiology might be of potential benefit to patients on dialysis.

A discussion between Drs. Peter Kotanko and Richard Weller on the latter’s research into the effects of sunlight on systemic health. Dr. Weller describes two recent epidemiological studies he has performed in which he demonstrated an inverse relationship between sunlight exposure and blood pressure, and COVID mortality. He has previously demonstrated NO release from UV exposed skin to the circulation which may account for these effects.