View clinical trials related to Renal Blood Flow.
Filter by:Approximately 50% of patients in the intensive care unit (ICU) develop acute kidney injury (AKI) and more than 10% need dialysis. There is no treatment for AKI. Care is aiming for optimization of circulation and blood flow to the kidneys and avoiding nephrotoxic agents. There is conflicting data concerning whether early or late dialysis is harmful for the kidneys. No one has examined the physiological changes in the kidney when starting dialysis and which blood pressure that leads to most optimal physiological conditions for the kidneys during dialysis. In this descriptive study of 20 ICU patients suffering from AKI we aim to investigate renal physiology when starting continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) and also at different target blood pressures using retrograde renal vein thermodilution technique. In parallel we will also investigate and validate this invasive method with contrast enhanced ultrasound of the kidneys.
Estimation of Glomerular Filtration Rate (GFR) is the primary test used to assess patients with renal disease. Although serum creatinine based GFR and nuclear medicine based estimations are routinely used in clinical practice, GFR estimation by Inulin is the recommended gold standard. Inulin based estimation of GFR is cumbersome and time consuming. A decrease in blood flow to the kidney (Renal Blood Flow (RBF)) is known to cause a decrease in GFR. RBF is typically determined using radioactive tracers, contrast MRI or a cumbersome para-aminohippuric acid (PAH) clearance method. MRI based assessment of GFR and RBF have been suggested to provide reasonable accuracy. Most of these studies did not compare the GFR and RBF estimation directly to Inulin and PAH clearance which are ther gold standards . In this study we propose to estimate MRI based GFR estimation directly to Inulin and noncontrast MRI based derived RBF to PAH to assess if MRI is an accurate test of kidney function.