Helen Jaques

Meeting the demand for kidney transplants is a big problem worldwide. In the UK, for example, only 18% of patients waiting on the kidney transplant list and 28% on kidney/pancreas transplant list received a transplant during 2008-09. Donations from living people only made up 37% of the total UK kidney transplant programme in the same [...]

New research published in PLoS One has shown that drinking two or more fizzy drinks a day can double a woman’s chance of developing signs of kidney disease – but only if she drinks full-sugar sodas. David A Shoham and colleagues studied data from more than 9,000 individuals in the population-based National Health and Nutrition [...]

A new study of more than a million transplant recipients has found that rejection rates are lower in patients who receive two organs at once than in those who receive a single organ. The study, published in Annals of Surgery, found that the rejection rates for organs cotransplanted with a donor-specific liver, heart or kidney [...]

A study by Finkelstein and colleagues published recently in Kidney International has found that as many of a third of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) claim to know nothing about their disease or about their treatment options when their kidneys ultimately fail. CKD encompasses many types of kidney damage and is characterized by the [...]

Nature Clinical Practice Nephrology has recently published a review by Luyckx and Naicker highlighting the link between traditional medicines and kidney injury. Traditional and herbal remedies are widely used worldwide, with as many as 80% of people in some populations using such treatments. The use of herbal remedies becoming increasing common in Western countries, as [...]