Cardiac surgery-associated acute kidney injury: tools for enriching clinical trial populations

Excerpt

The term acute kidney injury (AKI) has become synonymous with an acute decline in renal function, even though the kidneys themselves are almost never “acutely injured”. When AKI occurs soon after heart surgery, it is called cardiac surgery-associated AKI (CS-AKI), and because of its frequency (up to 50% depending on the definition used and the population studied),1,2 it has become an outcome of great interest to clinicians and researchers alike. Many efforts have been made to achieve consensus in definition— most recently converging on the “Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes (KDIGO)” definition3 recently reviewed by Schetz—4 and controversy exists about whether urine output criteria always increase the diagnostic precision for this definition system.5 …