NEW ORLEANS — Patients with elevated atherosclerotic CVD and kidney failure risks may never have received a nephrology referral, according to data presented at the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings.
Patients with CV complications and kidney failure may not receive timely nephrology referrals due to various barriers and prioritizing patients with more advanced chronic kidney disease, according to Sharlene Shirali, a medical student at University of California, San Francisco, and colleagues.
“At the systems level, barriers to nephrology referrals include increased wait times and

NEW ORLEANS — Ann O’Hare, MD, said she sometimes wonders how she ended up in nephrology, a field in which she felt like an outsider during training.
“I think I found a place for myself, because the sentiments and the attitudes and the interests that almost led me into geriatrics have stayed with me as a nephrologist,” O’Hare, professor of medicine at the University of Washington/VA Puget Sound Health Care System, told Healio.
Among those are compassion, centering the person and going beyond the strictly medical to uphold who they are and what matters to them in the their care.  These are

NEW ORLEANS — Patients with Medicare Advantage plans may have lower odds of receiving a kidney transplant referral than patients with traditional Medicare, data presented at the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings show.
More than 50% of Medicare-eligible patients receiving dialysis are enrolled in Medicare Advantage plans as of 2024, according to Adam S. Wilk, PhD, associate professor of surgery at Indiana University School of Medicine, and colleagues. The researchers aimed to assess whether Medicare Advantage plans, compared with traditional Medicare, may help or hinder access

NEW ORLEANS — Vascular access type and other factors may be associated with depression severity for patients on hemodialysis, according to data presented at the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings.
To evaluate depression severity among a cohort of patients on hemodialysis, Abdalmahmoud Alwali, MD, MPH, a nephrology fellow at Harlem Hospital Center in New York, and colleagues assessed 175 patients (57.7% men; 83.4% Black) who initiated dialysis through an arteriovenous fistula (68%), permanent catheter (24.6%) or arteriovenous graft (7.4%). Depression was assessed using the

NEW ORLEANS — Perceived and objective understandings of AKI and related risks may be low among patients who had AKI during hospitalization, according to data presented at the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings.
After hospitalization, patients who had AKI face greater risks for rehospitalization, kidney disease progression and mortality, according to Ibnat Meah, research assistant at John Hopkins School of Medicine. Educating patients about their condition after hospitalization is important for lowering these risks, but little is known about patients’ perceived and objective

DENVER — In this video from the American Academy of Dermatology Annual Meeting, April W. Armstrong, MD, MPH, discusses data presented on a new generation of tyrosine kinase 2 inhibitors for treating patients with plaque psoriasis.
Armstrong, professor and chief of dermatology at University of California, Los Angeles, noted that data from phase 3 clinical trials for zasocitinib (Takeda) and envudeucitinib (Alumis), two enhanced, next-generation tyrosine kinase 2 (TYK2) inhibitors, demonstrated significant reduction in plaque psoriasis by week 24.
“For a very long time, we had