Bias and Racism Teaching Rounds at an Academic Medical Center.

Racism and events of racial violence have dominated the US news in 2020 almost as much as the novel coronavirus pandemic. The resultant civil unrest and demands for racial justice have spawned a global call for change. As a subset of a society that struggles with racism and other explicit biases, it is inescapable that some physicians and health-care employees will have the same explicit biases as the general population.

An unexpected cause of acute kidney injury in a patient with ANCA associated vasculitis.

Diagnostic kidney biopsies sometimes yield clinically unsuspected diagnoses. We present a case of a 69-year-old woman with established ANCA-associated vasculitis (AAV) of 4 years duration who was in clinical remission following cytotoxic therapy and was on maintenance immunosuppression. She presented to the hospital with acute kidney injury (AKI), symptoms suggestive of a systemic vasculitis, and in addition had hypercalcemia, metabolic alkalosis.

Tryptase is not cleared by the kidneys into the urine.

Background: Patients with chronic kidney disease have been reported to have increased concentrations of blood tryptase. Detection of tryptase in the urine of healthy subjects has been reported.

Objective: The objective is to determine whether tryptase is indeed cleared by the kidneys.

Comparison of low-dose gentamicin with minocycline as catheter lock solutions in the prevention of catheter-related bacteremia.

Background: Catheter-restricted antibiotic lock solutions were found to be effective in the prevention of catheter-related bacteremia (CRB), but insufficient data are available about the ideal agent and dose. We hypothesized that a low concentration of gentamicin would be as effective as the high doses studied in the past.

Methods: In this prospective, open-labeled, randomized, clinical trial of patients on long-term hemodialysis therapy, patients were randomly assigned to administration of an antibiotic lock solution of gentamicin/citrate (4 mg/mL), minocycline/EDTA, or the control solution of heparin.

Mortality risk factors in chronic haemodialysis patients with infective endocarditis.

Background: It is well documented that infective endocarditis (IE) is strongly associated with morbidity and mortality in haemodialysis (HD) patients. Less clear are the mortality risk factors for IE, particularly in an urban African-American dialysis population.

Methods: IE patients were identified from the medical records for the period from January 1999 to February 2004 and confirmed by Duke criteria.