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NDT Advance Access published online on November 5, 2009
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation, doi:10.1093/ndt/gfp541
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© The Author 2009. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ERA-EDTA. All rights reserved. For Permissions, please e-mail: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org


What dishwashers and humans have in common?

Markus Ketteler and Patrick H. Biggar

Division of Nephrology, Klinikum Coburg, Coburg, Germany

Correspondence and offprint requests to: Markus Ketteler; E-mail: markus.ketteler@klinikum-coburg.de

Keywords: bisphosphonates; calcification; calcium; phosphate; pyrophosphates

The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below.

One answer to the title question could be that both ‘species’, dishwashers and humans, can be protected from unwanted calcification by the anticalcifying properties of small double-phosphate molecules, diphosphonates or pyrophosphates, respectively. More than 40 years ago, we started to realize that there are compounds present in many biological fluids capable of inhibiting precipitation of calcium phosphates [1]. These compounds have been identified as inorganic pyrophosphates (P–O–P) and have been demonstrated to slow the transformation of amorphous calcium phosphate into its crystalline form while inhibiting crystal aggregation. This observation led to the development of diphosphonates, in which the P–O–P bond is replaced by a P–C–P bond and, subsequently, to the development of bone scanning agents . . . [Full Text of this Article]


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