NDT Advance Access originally published online on December 15, 2006
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation 2007 22(3):689-692; doi:10.1093/ndt/gfl673
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© The Author [2006]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ERA-EDTA. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Poor performance of diagnostic tests for atherosclerotic renal artery stenosisdiscrepancies between stenosis and renal function
Department of Medicine, University Hospital Maastricht and Cardiovascular Research Institute Maastricht (CARIM), Maastricht, The Netherlands
Correspondence and offprint requests to: Peter W. de Leeuw, MD, PhD, FAHA, Department of Medicine, University Hospital Maastricht, PO Box 5800, 6202 AZ Maastricht, The Netherlands. Email: p.deleeuw@intmed.unimaas.nl
Keywords: hypertension; renal artery stenosis; screening
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| Introduction |
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Both from a pathophysiological point of view and from a clinical standpoint, atherosclerotic renal artery stenosis (RAS) remains an enigmatic disorder. With its capricious clinical presentations, it is often overlooked and diagnosed only at a very late stage. To a certain degree, the latter may be attributable to a lack of enthusiasm amongst clinicians to search for RAS. The basis for this nihilistic attitude mainly lies in the failure of several prospective studies to show a large enough benefit of surgery or angioplasty (with or without stent placement) on blood pressure and renal function. Surely, exposing a patient to diagnostic tests can be justified only when the outcome of these tests are relevant for further clinical decision making. In the case of RAS, however, the situation is a bit more complicated than outcome trials would have us believe. Indeed, even though the effect of balloon angioplasty may be relatively small
| When should we think of renal artery stenosis? |
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| What do screening tests teach us? |
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| Our faulty concept of symmetry |
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| The fallacy of clinically significant stenosis |
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| Where should we go from here? |
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