I ssue 1

A Nephrology On-Demand publication.

Visit us @ myNOD.org or on Twitter
@nephOnDemand to learn more.

The Nephrology On-Demand Plus iOS

App keeps you connected w/ all the latest
teaching resources. Download the newest
version @ goo.gl/tfSAQT

Contributors: A Bansal (U of Pennsylvania) | P Dedhia

(U of Cincinnati) | A Elebiary (Lahey Clinic) | X Vela (U
of El Salvador) | D Thomson (ECU) | P Jawa (ECU) | S
Sridharan (Lister Hospital, UK) | F Iannuzsella (IRCCS,
Italy) | D Mitema (Johns Hopkins U) | Malvinder Parmar
(Northern Ontario, Canada)

Volume 2

Year 2015

URL http://goo.gl/QDSB5B

#Kidney
KONNECTI ON
Editor: Tejas Desai | Chief: Cynthia Christiano | Free subscription by emailing myFellowship@ecu.edu

BETTER THAN EVER

Welcome to the start of a new
academic year! This year, we @
#KidneyKonnection have a new set
of features and specials to enhance
your nephrology learning. Coming
off a great inaugural year in which
we had over 2000 readers (online
and print), #KidneyKonnection
Volume 2 will be bolder and fresher.

appearance makes the online and print

versions even more visually stunning
than ever before.
Finally, we're introducing new
features and enhancing others. We're
keeping our most popular feature, Lit
in a Minute, and enhancing it with
Selfies, a collection of phenomenal
high-resolution images of the kidney.
Selfies will make you look at the
kidney in a whole new way. And
that's just the tip of the iceberg.

The new #KidneyKonnection

begins with its title. You'll notice
that the title is now a Twitter
hashtag. Use #KidneyKonnection
Welcome to the 2nd volume of
anytime you want to communicate
#KidneyKonnection: an (r)evolution
with the global readership. We'll
in nephrology education.
take the best tweets and publish them
Donald Mitema
Amar Bansal
(in print) in a later issue.
The next striking change is our new
look. It's cleaner, crisper, and more
vibrant than Volume 1. The new

Cynthia Christiano

Malvinder Parmar

Paras Dedhia

Siva Sridharan

Ahmed Elebiary

Denise Thomson

Francesco Iannuzzella

Xavier Vela

Pankaj Jawa

Tejas Desai

LIT IN A MINUTE
THE HARMONIZE TRIAL

PMID: 25402495

For decades kidney docs have relied upon resin therapy to manage hyperkalemia in
advanced & end-stage kidney disease patients. The most common resin used,
kayexalate, surprisingly has little evidence to support its effectiveness. Most of its
(continued next page)
benefits are anecdotally reported, as are the real and horrific

SELFIES

BACK TO
SCHOOL...ONLINE

DEPOSITS

SPECIAL FEATURE
Rodney Dangerfield in Back to School (1986)

WE ASKED THE CONTRIBUTORS TO LIST SOME OF THEIR FAVORITE ONLINE

EDUCATIONAL RESOURCES IN NEPHROLOGY. HERE'S WHAT THEY SAID...
Pubmed

Pocket Medicine by the MGH

Pubmed is a free resource that provides access

to the primary literature. They provide nice
abstracts that I can quickly skim before
deciding to delve deeper into the paper.

This is a great resource for when you're just

starting out your training. It gives you all the
information you need to survive your first few
weeks on the wards.

NKF eGFR Calculator

Nephrology On-Demand Plus App

This is a nifty app that estimates GFR using

This is a great resource to learn about

Nephrology, no matter your background.
The 10-Minute Round videos are probably
the best -- they teach you something in
Nephrology in ~ 10 minutes, which is key
for a busy doc.

different calculators, including the CKD

Epi, MDRD, & Cockroft-Gault formulas.
And For those involved in the care of the
pediatric population, the revised Bedside
Schwarz formula is included too.

An electron micrograph of a
sub-epithelial dense deposit. A
podocyte is seen in the bottom left
quadrant. Adjacent to the dense
deposit are evenly-spaced
protrusions -- the foot processes (red
arrows). The thick gray stripe is the
glomerular basement membrane,
which is uniform in color
(suggesting an absence of
intramembranous deposits). There
is speculation regarding the
components of the dense deposit,
but no single component has been
consistently identified.

The Online Global Kidney Academy

A great resource if you're looking for continuing education in Nephrology. So much content is updated daily & there's lots of
participation by experts & students.
Medscape Mobile
This app lets you connect w/Nephrology & other specialities. The content is
fresh & has drug/disease reference tools as well as CME courses.

LIT IN A MINUTE
THE HARMONIZE TRIAL
side effect of colonic necrosis. Thankfully,
there's a promising drug that can manage
hyperkalemia without the intestinal side
effects...ZS-9. We first came to learn about
ZS-9 in 2013. As an experimental
compound, ZS-9 had a nine-times greater
affinity for intestinal potassium than
kayexalate (hence the #9 in the name). In
late 2014, we learned of its name (sodium
zirconium cyclosilicate) and that it could

(continued from previous page)

PMID: 25402495

reduce potassium levels far greater than

placebo. The HARMONIZE trial
randomized hyperkalemic patients (due to
kidney disease or heart failure) into 1 of 4
dose escalated groups (0g, 5g, 10g, 15g).
Potassium levels fell faster w/higher
dosages of ZS-9 but without any major
adverse events.
While HARMONIZE didn't compare ZS-9
against kayexalate, it is a promising trial

both because of the effectiveness of the

drug and its favorable side effect profile.
Stay tuned for more trials & longer
follow up periods using ZS-9.