My research program has been dedicated to understanding the causes and consequences of age-related kidney disease and to utilize novel biomarkers for the early detection of kidney damage and reduced kidney function. Along with my colleagues from the CHS and Health ABC, I have conducted the…
more pioneering work to demonstrate with cystatin C the remarkable prognostic importance of impaired kidney function in elders. I coined the entity of preclinical kidney disease to describe the large population of elders with elevated cystatin C levels, but normal creatinine-based estimates of kidney function, who are at high risk for death and cardiovascular disease. The recent work for my research group has been dedicated to finding early markers of kidney injury in the urine that will precede any detectable loss in kidney function. We will study these urine biomarkers in several populations, including the ambulatory elderly, HIV-infected men and women, and in population-based studies. We believe that these injury markers hold promise both for understanding how various exposures impact the kidney, and also to forecast future declines in kidney failure.
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