Chronic kidney disease leads to a certain level of immunosuppression that puts patients at risk for infectious complications. Further, protective measures such as vaccination have low efficacy. The pathomechanisms behind this have been described in detail, however, there are numerous aspects of impaired regulation and activation of the different instances of the immune system. Much has been learned about the relation between CKD and the immune system. Therefore, therapeutic interventions are already available and several new pathways to improvement can be followed in the future.  

Chronic kidney disease is a powerful and independent risk for cardiovascular disease. In this session, the epidemiology, pathophysiology, and treatment of coronary artery disease in chronic kidney disease will be discussed. The presentation will focus on the current state of knowledge and opportunities for future research.  

ACE2 balances the renin angiotensin system (RAS) primarily by inactivating Angiotensin 2. ACE2 thereby helps to protect multiple tissues such as the lung, blood vessels, heart, or kidney and inactivation of ACE2 results in severe disease pathologies in these organs including diabetic nephropathies. ACE2 has also been identify as the critical receptor for the Spike proteins of SARS-CoV and SARS-CoV2 and is intricately involved in SARS and COVID-19 pathogenesis. Based on these finding, I will also discuss rationale drug development using soluble ACE2 for COVID-19 patients.  

In this session after a short introduction, the pathophysiology and staging of COVID-19 will be discussed. After that what the effect of covid-19 was on patients on dialysis. It is of utmost importance to know why dialysis patients have an increase risk for infections. Therefore, some words will be spent on the innate and adaptive immunity, immunosenescence, natural-killer cells, etc.  Also, some background mechanisms are given on the covid-19 induced acute kidney injury. Finally, treatment options are discussed and at the end a short summary and conclusion is given.

My presentation will review the role of transplantation in the management of ESKD. I will review the steps to transplantation, and the challenges that patients face. I will also review the challenges of transplant center choices that influence the probability of transplantation as well as recent changes to the allocation policy.  

This session will review the relevant and most recent data on the COVID-19 vaccine trials. We will focus on the specific vaccine types, the study designs, and the outcomes in terms of efficacy and safety. Briefly, we will discuss the emerging variants of concern and discuss their implication towards vaccine efficacy. We will answer audience questions regarding COVID-19 vaccines and specific issues related to patients with chronic kidney disease as well as kidney transplant recipients. 

The session will provide information about the clinical trials regarding COVID-19 vaccines and how they apply to patients with kidney disease. Available data related to the safety and efficacy of vaccination in kidney patients will also be discussed.

The goal of the session is to describe cultural and racial differences that have been shown to be associated with disparities in healthcare delivery among patients with chronic kidney disease.  

Dr. Finkelstein will review the new ISPD guidelines on practicing high quality peritoneal dialysis and discuss the challenges and barriers for U.S. nephrologists in achieving these standards of care. Regulations in the U.S. present major challenges to the implementation of these new proposals for practicing high quality peritoneal dialysis.  

New York City became the world's epicenter of the Covid-19 pandemic during March and April 2020. The stresses on medical facilities and health care providers was enormous and unprecedented. Many ethical issues arose for physicians and hospitals during this period. This session will be devoted to some of these issues and how physicians and hospitals tried to deal with them.  

This session describes a piece of research that aimed to describe the time of onset of intradialytic hypotension during hemodialysis sessions. The study was a retrospective, observational cohort study from hemodialysis clinics across the United States. As well as presenting the incidence of intradialytic hypotension throughout dialysis using several definitions of intradialytic hypotension, associations between early onset intradialytic hypotension and clinical parameters and mortality are explored.

When the pandemic hit everyone had to rethink their roles in healthcare. Dr. Topf looks at the pandemic through the eyes of a half dozen public physicians whose roles radically changed with the intense public interest and high stakes game of COVID research. Join Topf as he retraces the journey of some remarkable physicians and the challenges and opportunities found in the pandemic.