Urinary potassium excretion and its association with acute kidney injury in the intensive care unit.

Purpose: Using urinary indices as a quick bedside test to assist management of oliguria and acute kidney injury (AKI) has long been sought. This study assessed whether urinary potassium excretion is related to simultaneously calculated creatinine clearance (CrCl) and can predict AKI in the critically ill.

Materials And Methods: In this prospective cohort study, the correlation between 2-h urinary potassium excretion and simultaneously calculated CrCl of 61 critically ill patients was assessed by Pearson's correlation coefficient, and their ability to predict AKI (≥stage 1 KDIGO) in the subsequent 7 days was assessed by area under the receiver-operating-characteristic (AUROC) curve.

Serum relaxin levels in subjects with multiple sclerosis.

Multiple Sclerosis is an inflammatory, auto-immune, neurodegenerative disease of the central nervous system. The disease has a prevalence of approx 1:700 with at least 2.5 million cases worldwide.

Myelin repair in vivo is increased by targeting oligodendrocyte precursor cells with nanoparticles encapsulating leukaemia inhibitory factor (LIF).

Multiple sclerosis (MS) is a progressive demyelinating disease of the central nervous system (CNS). Many nerve axons are insulated by a myelin sheath and their demyelination not only prevents saltatory electrical signal conduction along the axons but also removes their metabolic support leading to irreversible neurodegeneration, which currently is untreatable. There is much interest in potential therapeutics that promote remyelination and here we explore use of leukaemia inhibitory factor (LIF), a cytokine known to play a key regulatory role in self-tolerant immunity and recently identified as a pro-myelination factor.