Renal Diseases

Renal diseases can be explosive and difficult to control or silent but progressive. Those that create acute and chronic renal failure become serious and often life-threatening burdens to patients and their families. Advanced diseases can be resistant to treatment and extremely expensive to manage. Early and precise diagnosis is the best solution to these problems. Renal biopsy is often the most efficient method for accurate diagnosis to allow disease-modifying therapy with steroids, anti-rejection immunosuppressive medication, plasmapheresis, or the new immunomodulating biological drugs. This book is a primer on the rationale for precise diagnosis of renal diseases to allow the greatest chance of stabilizing or remitting these diseases, which will otherwise create a permanent need for dialysis or transplantation. This collection of reports documents the type of disease that can be identified by renal biopsy. Reports from authors around the world describe their experience with the techniques, risk, and benefits of renal biopsy. These reports conclude that renal biopsy has become a universally used, safe, same-day, outpatient procedure that can give suggestions for treatments to prevent potentially devastating consequences.