NEW ORLEANS — With several new therapies, extensive research and critical trials underway, nephrology is in a “golden age,” according to Ron Wald, MDCM, MPH.
Wald, a nephrologist at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto, has spent more than 20 years working directly with patients. For his innovative research in critical care nephrology and maintenance dialysis, Wald received the J. Michael Lazarus Distinguished Award at the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings.
Healio spoke with Wald about his career and what excites him most about the future of the field.

BOSTON — Increasing influenza vaccination coverage to 70% could prevent more than 30,000 pediatric hospitalizations and 123 pediatric deaths, according to data presented at the Pediatric Academic Societies annual meeting.
The Healthy People 2030 initiative, launched by HHS in 2020, set a goal of achieving 70% coverage among all people aged 6 months and older.
However, CDC data reveal that pediatric vaccination rates have been steadily falling since the COVID-19 pandemic. Coverage among children aged 6 months through 17 years was 63.7% by the end of the 2019-2020 influenza season. In contrast,

WASHINGTON — Endocrine therapy is one of the top predictors of sexual dysfunction in women cancer survivors, according to a study shown at the ACOG Annual Clinical & Scientific Meeting.
“Perhaps the most surprising finding was what did not predict distress: age, menopausal status and chemotherapy were not independent predictors,” Claire F. Alcus, an MD candidate at University of Miami Miller School of Medicine, told Healio. “Clinicians often assume that older or postmenopausal patients, or those who received the most aggressive treatments, are at highest risk. Our data suggest otherwise.”

NEW ORLEANS — Patients with decompensated heart failure and kidney disease may have care expectations and understanding of prognoses that are “misaligned” with outcomes, according to researchers.
For a study presented at the National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings, researchers administered surveys with 13 questions about long-term care expectations, preferences and advance care planning to 297 patients (mean age, 61 years) hospitalized with decompensated heart failure in three hospitals affiliated with the University of Washington. Among the cohort, 40% had chronic kidney disease,

Extreme heat, air pollution, obesity and Black race are likely independent environmental and social predictors of developing hidradenitis suppurativa, according to a research letter published in JAMA Dermatology.
“Using patient address data from all academic Boston health systems, we observed significant spatial clustering with HS hot spots in south and central Boston,” the researchers wrote. “Our models’ high explanatory power support a role for place-based factors in HS epidemiology and substantiate emerging evidence that extreme heat and air pollution are risk factors for inflammatory

CHICAGO — Age, comorbidities, disposition and wait times drove adherence to follow-up care for stroke across clinical models, according to a poster presented at the American Academy of Neurology Annual Meeting.
These factors may help clinicians identify patients who are at risk for poor follow-up and improve prevention of recurrent stroke, Kelliann Donovan, MD, an incoming resident at Vanderbilt, told Healio.
“Adherence is a problem when it comes to appointments in general,” said Donovan, who was a fourth-year medical student at the University of Alabama at Birmingham (UAB)

For patients with newly diagnosed atrial fibrillation, a quality improvement initiative improved access to specialist care and adherence to guideline recommendations regarding early rhythm control, researchers reported.
The first analysis of the COMPASS initiative, developed by the Heart Rhythm Society, was presented at Heart Rhythm 2026.
The EAST-AFNET 4 trial “led to an upgrade in the guidelines to a class IIa indication for early rhythm control for patients diagnosed with atrial fibrillation in the last year. If you are more proactive at controlling a patient’s AF, it’s easier to control it.

Accelerated corneal cross-linking using hypo-osmolar riboflavin may be used to treat keratoconus in patients with thin corneas, according to a study in Journal of Refractive Surgery.
Efe Koser, MD, of University of Health Sciences, Beyoglu Eye Training and Research Hospital, Istanbul, and colleagues wrote that the Dresden protocol for cross-linking excludes patients with thinner corneas.
“Alternative protocols using hypo-osmolar riboflavin solution (300 mOsmol/L, without dextran) have been developed to transiently swell thin corneas above the safety threshold to address this constraint,” they

Once-daily vosoritide improved annualized growth velocity at 1 year for children with five different genetic subtypes of short stature, according to findings from a phase 2 basket trial.
As Healio previously reported, children with short stature due to hypochondroplasia had a rise in growth velocity with 1 year of subcutaneous vosoritide (Voxzogo, BioMarin Pharmaceutical) in a phase 2 trial. In new findings published in The Journal of Clinical Endocrinology & Metabolism, researchers found vosoritide also boosted height velocity for children with short stature caused by a genetic defect in

Risk factors for allergic rhinitis among children and adolescents included paracetamol and antibiotic use, meat intake, computer use, exposure to animals and truck traffic, according to data published in Pediatric Allergy and Immunology.
Yet overall prevalence remained stable compared with earlier research, Refiloe Masekela, MD, PhD, head of the department of pediatrics and child health, College of Health Sciences, School of Clinical Medicine, University of KwaZulu-Natal, and colleagues wrote.
The cross-sectional phase 1 Global Asthma Network study comprised 62,971 children aged 6 to 7 years