Diagnosing Renal Artery Stenosis
NYU Langone doctors are experts at diagnosing renal artery stenosis. The condition results from a narrowing of one or both renal arteries, the blood vessels that lead to the kidneys. As blood flow decreases, the kidneys cant function properly. It can also cause the kidneys to produce a chemical called renin, which raises blood pressure.;
The kidneys are a pair of bean-shaped organs located on both sides of the lower back. Their job is to filter and remove waste from the blood, help control blood pressure, and regulate electrolytes, which are minerals that conduct electrical impulses in the body.;
Typically, renal artery stenosis develops as a result of atherosclerosis, which occurs when plaque, a waxy substance composed of cholesterol, fat, and calcium, builds up in the arteries. Risk factors include a high-fat diet, a sedentary lifestyle, smoking, and a family history of the condition.;
Less commonly, renal artery stenosis can be caused by fibromuscular dysplasia, a condition in which many arteries in the body are prone to narrowing.
When plaque builds up in the renal arteries and blood flow decreases, the kidneys release renin, a substance that raises blood pressure. This is often the first sign of renal artery stenosis. Some people also experience fluid retention, shortness of breath, headaches, and ankle swelling. If both renal arteries are blocked, kidney failure can occur.;
How Do The Kidneys Work
The body takes nutrients from food and converts them to energy. Afterthe body has taken the food that it needs, waste products are leftbehind in the bowel and in the blood.
The kidneys and urinary system keep chemicals, such as potassium andsodium, and water in balance, and remove a type of waste, called urea,from the blood. Urea is produced when foods containing protein, such asmeat, poultry, and certain vegetables, are broken down in the body.Urea is carried in the bloodstream to the kidneys.
Two kidneys, a pair of purplish-brown organs, are located below theribs toward the middle of the back. Their function is to:
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Remove liquid waste from the blood in the form of urine
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Keep a stable balance of salts and other substances in the blood
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Produce erythropoietin, a hormone that aids the formation of red blood cells
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Regulate blood pressure
The kidneys remove urea from the blood through tiny filtering unitscalled nephrons. Each nephron consists of a ball formed of small bloodcapillaries, called a glomerulus, and a small tube called a renaltubule.
Urea, together with water and other waste substances, forms the urineas it passes through the nephrons and down the renal tubules of thekidney.
Who Are The Founders
The folks behind The Kidney Disease Solution are Duncan Capicchiano and Fiona Chin. They are both capable Naturopaths from Melbourne, Australia. They have also co-founded a clinic in Melbourne and have more than 13 health therapists to help patients live healthy lives.
Duncan received from the Australian College of Natural Medicine his advanced Diploma in Naturopathy. He also has additional training and diplomas in Craniosacral therapy, Kinesiology, Homeopathy, and Nutrition and Herbal Medicine.
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How Does This Work
You dont need to follow each of the available remedies and the different diet programs. The Kidney Disease Solution approaches each treatment holistically. Individuals will have to treat their condition according to their kidney disease situation. It will also depend on their specific requirements.
For example, those who have hypertension, kidney stones, or diabetes might have to go through different therapies and diet plans.
There are a plethora of specific organic remedies that you need to take daily to care for your problem. Moreover, theres a cookbook included. Your diet significantly affects your problem. You need specific recipes to properly support your body to function healthily.
All the treatments they have contained are based on the latest developments from multiple research and studies. The studies they based their treatments are conducted worldwide and are ultimately focused on kidney health and kidney treatment.
Through their holistic approach, they encourage you to do meditation yoga and exercises. The guided meditations are available in audio format.
Since one of the main reasons for the degrade in health is stress, they also offer guided meditation exercises to help with dealing with anxiety. This can also be used to help improve your sleep quality.
The Doppler Ultrasound: A General Review
Doppler ultrasound has been extensively utilized in assessing reno-vascular diseases since it is a safe, non-invasive, available and cheap. These measurements depend on the Doppler effect is used to measure changes in the frequency of the echoes reflected from moving blood cells. In many cases, Doppler ultrasound replaces X-ray angiography. The most important advantage of Doppler ultrasound over other imaging methods that it provides a real-time assessment of blood flow.
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Could I Have Kidney Failure If The Ultrasound Was Normal
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What Is Kidney Failure
The kidneys;are designed to maintain proper fluid balance in the body, remove waste and eliminate toxins from the blood. The kidneys make urine, which carries away those products of elimination and excess fluid. They also make hormones, which stimulate the making of red blood cells in the bone marrow and strengthen the bones. The term kidney failure describes a situation in which the kidneys have lost the ability to effectively carry out these functions. A build-up of waste levels can cause a chemical imbalance in the blood, which can be fatal if left untreated. Patients with renal failure may develop a low blood count or weak bones over time. Chronic renal failure can be caused by a variety of diseases and means failure of kidney function over time.
Other conditions can result in acute;kidney failure, such as a drop in blood flow to the kidneys, blockage of urine flow, or damage from infections, certain medications or contrast materials;used in imaging. Acute kidney failure can occur quickly and may leave the kidneys with permanent damage. In many cases, it occurs in patients who are already critically ill and require intensive care.
Symptoms may include:
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Its Your Decision Whether You Get A Preventive Screening
Theres nothing wrong with signing up for these screenings, so long as you understand they may not reveal any useful information. In some cases, the findings may lead to more testing.
If you are very concerned about your cardiovascular risk, these tests are reasonable, if you dont mind paying $135 to $150 out of pocket, says Dr. Laffin. But what will you do with the results? Screenings are only a small part of determining risk.
If you are very worried about your risk, tell your doctor. Together, you can determine your actual risk and make a plan of action to lower it, he says.
Is There An At
There are home tests that allow you to collect blood or urine samples and drop them off at a lab or mail them in. Results are interpreted by a doctor and sent to you. These may be a good option for people who are unable to visit a doctors office or don’t have insurance to cover the tests. However, if youre able to make an appointment to see a doctor, consider that option first.
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Kidney Failure From Sepsis
Kidney failure is very common in sepsis, but it can be reversed most of the time with the proper treatment of sepsis. If you would like to understand what sepsis is, please read this article: Low blood pressure and a fever, think sepsis. In summary, sepsis is a potentially life-threatening complication from an infection where the body can get overwhelmed and crash down.
Patients with severe sepsis and kidney failure may need intensive care in the ICU. The treatment is focused on treating the infection and supporting the body to maintain good blood circulation. If a good blood circulation with normal blood pressure is restored, the kidneys start to recover, and the kidney failure can be ultimately reversed back to normal.
Sonographic Evaluation Of The Kidneys And Urinary Tract
Because of their location, architecture, and limited spectrum of pathology, the kidneys are ideally suited for evaluation by ultrasound. In addition, it is safe, readily available, easily performed at the bedside or in the office, and free of radiation. For these reasons, sonography is the preferred imaging modality and often the only one required. Evaluation includes assessment of the size and shape, the echogenicity, the urinary space , the presence of masses, and the vasculature. Very few findings are specific, and interpretation, therefore, requires clinical correlation, another reason for the participation of nephrologists in this procedure.
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What Does An Ultrasound Of The Kidneys Show
There are many different problems that a kidney ultrasound procedure will find, and early detection of these disorders can dramatically improve the effectiveness of their treatment. Some examples are cysts, suspected cancers, and kidney stones. These are some of the most common examples of conditions that the ultrasound kidney can detect:
What To Expect At A Kidney Ultrasound
If your doctor orders a kidney ultrasound, theyll have instructions about how to prepare and what to expect. Typically, this information includes:
- drinking 3 eight-ounce glasses of water at least one hour before the exam and not emptying your bladder
- signing a consent form
- removing clothing and jewelry since youll likely be given a medical gown
- lying facedown on an exam table
- having a conductive gel applied to your skin in the area being examined
- having the transducer rubbed against the area being examined
You might be a little uncomfortable lying on the table and the gel and transducer might feel cold, but the procedure is noninvasive and painless.
Once the procedure is done, the technician will forward the results to your doctor. Theyll review them with you during an appointment that you can make the same time you make the ultrasound appointment.
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Tests For Kidney Cancer
Kidney cancer might be found because of signs or symptoms a person is having, or it might be found because of lab tests or imaging tests a person is getting for another reason. The actual diagnosis of kidney cancer is made by looking at a sample of kidney cells in the lab or sometimes by how the kidney looks on an imaging test. If you think you have possible signs or symptoms of kidney cancer, see your doctor.
What Is The Kidney Disease Solution
Can Ultrasound Detect Chronic Kidney Disease
The Kidney Disease Solution is an all-in-one three-phase program designed to help people reverse kidney damage and improve their kidney function while soothing the pain from the symptoms. Its made to safeguard you from adding damage to your kidneys so that you can avoid transplant and dialysis.
To tackle chronic kidney disease, it focuses on using natural and safe solutions without having you go through extreme measures.
In the program youll find a collection of ebooks and cookbooks. It includes specific instructions such as test result interpretation, a guide on how to structure a diet and treatment program with specific instructions regarding how to manage the plan that fits with your condition.
Additionally, it includes audiobooks for meditation and a few videos so you can tackle your kidney disease with a more holistic approach. This may be helpful with your healing, and it also helps you to practice mindfulness.
A few elements from traditional eastern medicine was incorporated with the latest findings in naturopathic science for the treatments.
The best part about the program is that they include a free lifetime program update. ;Members will discover new information and solutions to help them with their therapy. If you have questions, they also included a lifetime email support.
They make sure that youll get advice throughout and after the program to get the best health for your kidneys.
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Kidney Ultrasound What It Shows & How To Prepare
If you are suffering from a problem with your kidneys, you may need to get an ultrasound of the organs performed regularly. Furthermore, doctors may use an ultrasound to diagnose problems with these organs. The procedure is generally considered to be safe and effective. In order to ensure that the procedure is properly performed, its important to choose a skilled and experienced physician to perform it. Heres what you need to know about a kidney ultrasound procedure.
What Are They Looking For In A Pelvic Ultrasound
A pelvic ultrasound is a noninvasive diagnostic exam that produces images that are used to assess organs and structures within the female pelvis. A pelvic ultrasound allows quick visualization of the female pelvic organs and structures including the uterus, cervix, vagina, fallopian tubes and ovaries.
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Kidney Failure From Severe Dehydration
Severe dehydration is one of the most common causes of reversible kidney failure. Dehydration can be a serious life-threatening disorder. Read Hospitalized for Dehydration if you would like to understand what to expect when hospitalized for dehydration. Kidney failure is one of the most common complications of dehydration.
During the early stages of every dehydration, your kidneys essentially shut themselves down to preserve water. Once the dehydration is corrected, the kidneys start to open up and quickly get your urine production back to normal. The blood tests I mentioned earlier help decide whether the kidney failure is still in the early rapidly reversible state. If the ratio of BUN to Cr is equal to or more than 20, your kidney failure from dehydration is likely in the early rapidly reversible stage.
When the treatment of dehydration is delayed for several days, your kidneys go into the second stage of kidney failure. Small tubes inside the kidneys start to die off and you have structural damage inside the kidneys. This type of kidney failure is medically called Acute Tubular Necrosis or ATN. Necrosis simply means dying off. ATN is still reversible in most cases, but it takes longer to recover from. The tubes that die off will have to regenerate so that the kidney failure can ultimately be reversed. It may take a few weeks to reverse the kidney failure when ATN is present.
Can Ultrasound Detect Chronic Kidney Disease
Approximately 37 million Americans have Chronic Kidney Disease . However, the majority of them do not know it until it is too late. In the medical community, kidney disease is among the most complicated diseases to remedy. Your only options are either to prevent them before you reach the point at which you will require dialysis, or worse, kidney transplant.
You dont have to go through extreme procedures and treatments since you are being proactive or already have kidney disease. Using a simple three-phase system, The Kidney Disease Solution teaches you how you can cure your kidneys naturally.
Before you continue, you may want to check out this video of Home Remedies TV on YouTube that gives a quick review. Afterward, youll want to read the rest of the article for a more comprehensive review of The Kidney Disease Solution.
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Model Selection: Prediction Of Continuous Egfrs Through Cnns
We predicted eGFRs based on patients kidney ultrasound images by using deep CNNs. Our neural network architecture, as illustrated in Fig. , was referenced from the ResNet-101 model. In brief, the ResNet-101 model comprises a bunch of residual blocks, with each block being a combination of convolution and identity-mapping layers, resulting in a total of 101 layers . To predict the patients eGFRs, we replaced the last 1000-class classifier in the ResNet-101 model by using a regressor of consecutive fully connected layers, comprising 512 , 512 , 256 , and 1 , as illustrated in Fig. . We employed a dropout layer to reduce overfitting between every two consecutive fully connected layers, where the dropout probability was determined using the grid search method. The activation function of all layers except the output layer used rectified linear units; the output layer adopted a linear activation function because this prediction task was a regression-type problem with the output values ranging from 0 to >100. For this regression-type prediction problem, we optimized the mean squared error defined as follows:
where \ and Yt are the predicted and actual eGFRs of sample i, respectively.
What Should I Expect During A Kidney Ultrasound Procedure
Kidney ultrasounds are performed in both inpatient and outpatient settings. The following steps apply:
- Youll prepare for the procedure by removing your street clothes and any jewelry that youre wearing. A hospital gown will be provided for you to change into.
- You will be positioned on your stomach in the examination area.
- A gel will be applied on the skin where the transducer goes. This substance serves to heighten contact between the transducer and your skin, improving sound wave transmission into the body. ;
- The transducer emits sound waves into the body. These waves will reflect off the kidney and other internal structures and, on being captured by a computer, will provide the data it needs to create an image of your organs.
- The images created by the ultrasound will go into digital storage, for future reference.
- Multiple images of your bladder, both before and after urination, will be taken. This will assist your physician in interpreting the ultrasound data, because of the close working relationship between the kidneys and bladder.
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