Credit: Kim Ratlliff, Augusta University photographer
Young pregnant women, who appear to have fully recovered from an acute injury that reduced their kidney function, have higher rates of significant problems like preeclampsia and low birthweight babies, problems which indicate their kidneys have not actually fully recovered.
Now scientists have developed a rodent model that is enabling studies to better understand, identify and ideally avoid this recently identified association, they report in the
Journal of the American Society of Nephrology. We are talking about a population of young women that we usually think about as protected and healthy, and they are not if they have had a kidney insult, says Dr. Jennifer C. Sullivan, pharmacologist and physiologist in the Department of Physiology at the Medical College of Georgia and interim dean of The Graduate School at Augusta University. We think there is injury, potentially even years later, in some of these young women that we