Chronic kidney disease (CKD) and end stage renal disease (ESRD) are significant causes of adult morbidity and mortality worldwide. Though these conditions are common, the mechanisms of pathogenesis in kidney disease are poorly understood. Genetic predisposition has been established in the African American population; however this does not explain the ubiquity of CKD in the United States and abroad. Diabetes and hypertension are the two most frequently occurring co-morbidities in kidney disease and both have been identified as putative sources of injury to the delicate filtering structures of the kidney. Furthermore, the intrinsic functional relationship between the cardiovascular and renal organ systems adds to the plausibility of a hemodynamic cause. In light of this knowledge, we aim to explore the roles of genetic predisposition and hypertension in the pathogenesis and progression of CKD.
The filtering apparatus of the kidney, the glomerulus, is a looping tuft of capillaries specialized to allow the passage of water and certain substances from the blood while restricting others. Glomeruli at the corticomedullary boundary of the kidney experience blood pressures closer to those in systemic arterioles and are subject to similar hemodynamic stresses. To evaluate the role of hypertension in CKD, we employed a well-known model of hypertensive kidney disease in mice involving uninephrectomy (UNX), subcutaneous implantation of a timed-release pellet containing the active aldosterone precursor deoxycorticosterone acetate (DOCA), and a high-salt diet. Given the role of heritability in human CKD pathogenesis, we applied the DOCA-UNX model in two strains of mice with differing susceptibility to kidney damage, the 129S6 and C57BL/6 strains, to evaluate the effects of genetic predisposition. Mice were subjected to varying lengths of hypertension exposure and their kidneys were subsequently examined by transmission electron microscopy (TEM). Ultrastructural lesions of glomeruli were evaluated by a renal pathologist and assigned subjective pathology scores based on the extent and severity of involvement.
We hypothesized that certain glomerular lesions, particularly those involving the podocytes of the visceral epithelium, would increase in severity in mice with heritable susceptibility (129S6) as well as those with longer exposure to glomerular hypertension. Our observations demonstrate these hypotheses are partially correct. By TEM histopathology, mouse strain was found to have a significant effect on the severity of certain epithelial lesions while duration of hypertension had a significant effect on the overall morphological pathology of the podocytes, glomerular basement membrane, and glomerulus as a whole. These results provide a promising foundation for further investigation of the pathogenesis of CKD in mice.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:bu.edu/oai:open.bu.edu:2144/17039 |
| Date | 20 June 2016 |
| Creators | Stevenson, James Ware |
| Source Sets | Boston University |
| Language | en_US |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Thesis/Dissertation |
| Rights | Attribution 4.0 International, http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/ |
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