Background
Jade Teakell
FLOZINATing to the Future- Long Term Effects of ...

This week, we will discuss post-trial follow-up for EMPA-Kidney. What are the longer-term effects of empagliflozin for patients with chronic kidney disease?

FLOZINATing to the Future- Long Term Effects of Empagliflozin in Patients with CKD
Background
Brian Rifkin
The Ondansetron Ballet: Torsades de Pointes

Nausea is a very common and distressing problem. Some medications that treat nausea carry a higher risk for arrhythmias, like Torsades de Pointes, and sudden cardiac death. Is ondansetron safe for use in patients on hemodialysis?

The Ondansetron Ballet: Torsades de Pointes
Background
Cristina Adriana Popa
Re”FINE”ing the role of non steroidal MRAs in ...

This week, we will discuss non-steroidal mineralocorticoid antagonist in the multiverse of cardiovascular-kidney-metabolic. What FINEHEART pooled analysis would add to what we already learned from FIDELIO-DKD trial?

Re”FINE”ing the role of non steroidal MRAs in Cardio Kidney Metabolic syndrome
Background
Cristina Adriana Popa
Playing It Safe: Can Felzartamab Fill the Gap ...

This week is time antibody mediated rejection treatment in kidney transplant. A new molecule targeting CD38, on the horizon, safely tested in a phase 2 trial

Playing It Safe: Can Felzartamab Fill the Gap in AMR Treatment?
Background
Jade Teakell
The pressure is on! Unravelling the ESPRIT of ...

This week, we will discuss the ongoing saga of blood pressure targets in patients with hypertension. This time its ESPRIT (Effects of Intensive Systolic Blood Pressure Lowering Treatment in Reducing Risk of Vascular Events) making a case for case for intensive BP control in most hypertensive individuals, including those with a history of diabetes and stroke.

The pressure is on! Unravelling the ESPRIT of Intensive vs Standard BP Control

Meta

What's up with the NephJC signal cityscape

In the last few months we have been scheduling our chats out further and further, however this breaks down when a high impact trial is published. This led to the concept of the emergency NephJC chat. We did it first for AKIKI and ELAIN:

And then most recently for this week's chat on EMPA-REG

Some people have asked about the buildings in the cityscape. They are:

Sears Tower in Chicago for Edgar

Leaning Tower of Pisa for Francesco

The Gherkin in London for Tom and Matt

The Statue of Liberty in New York for Kenar and Scherly

The CN Tower of Toronto for Swapnil (closest I could get to Ottawa)

The Renaissance Center in Detroit for Joel

The AT&T building in Nashville for Anna

The Trans America Pyramid in San Francisco for Graham

That's not the whole team but it is a start.

NephJC Summer Book Club Selection

Thanks everyone for voting. The results are in and Eric Topol's The Patient Will See You Now won.

The voting looked like this:

But the reason we asked how likely you are to read the book was so we could weight the votes. The weighting worked like this:

  • 0.2 for I'll read it if I have time
  • 0.4 for I'll read it if it is the book I want
  • 0.6 for 50-50
  • 0.8 for I will buy and start
  • 1.0 for scout's honor

This turned out to not really affect the results

So Topol's book it is. The Patient Will See You Now examines how changes in technology are forcing a democratization of medicine and empowering patients in an unprecedented way. This seems like an important theme for today medical climate. The exact date of the chat has not been fixed but it will likely be mid to late July, so start reading. Watch the blog for summaries of all the chapters, similar to how we covered Being Mortal.

Ted Cruz drops out, the primaries are over!

Thanks everyone for voting for what you want covered in NephJC.

The winner is a prospective RCT to see if this Pip/Tazo+Vanco toxicity is real. The reference is here. Back ground from NephMadness 2015 here and ALiEM discussed it here. We will be discussing this on May 31 and June 1. There is an #AskASN chat on May24 pushing us back a week.

Don't forget Next Tuesday/Wednesday we go all Acid-Base for a discussion of acetazolamide.

 

 

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The NephJC Book Club Returns. Vote for your choice.

Last summer we did a book club on Atul Gawande's Being Mortal. The NephJC team blogged its way through every chapter and we did a discussion of the book during one of our Tuesday/Wednesday chats. We think the summer is a great time to slow down from the rapid digestion of medical literature and enjoy a slower paced book. We couldn't decide on a book among ourselves so we are turning to you to pick this Summer's book. Here are the choices:

1. When Breath Becomes Air by Dr. Paul Kalanithi. NYT Review.

2. The Patient will See You Now by Dr. Eric Topol (@erictopol) NYT Review. 

3. How doctors think by Dr. Jerome Groopman. NYT Review

4. On the Move by Dr. Oliver Sacks. NYT Review

5. The Laws of Medicine: Field Notes from an Uncertain Science by Dr. Siddhartha Mukherjee. Los Angeles Times Review

#NephJC is now part of Altmetrics

Altmetrics is a company that tracks realtime references, reads and mentions of research articles across the web and social media. They give authors and institutions a sense of what research is moving the needle faster and more comprehensively than reference tracking could. The work NephJC does will now be part captured as part of this goal.

When I read the following on their website, I knew that NephJC and Altmetrics were natural partners:

“Scientists are increasingly discussing papers online, but on social media sites, rather than on publisher’s sites. There’s huge value in being able to see what your peers - and people in other fields - have said about an article. Up until now, this has been difficult to achieve.”

Our spotlight just got a little brighter.

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The Neph-Twitterverse discovers Twitter polls

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A few weeks ago, the folks at twitter announced they were rolling out Twitter polls. Previously, tweeps would use manually counting responses or the RT-if-you-agree Fav-if-you-don't approach. This is how the polls were supposed to work:

So what, you might say? A few users (notably @conradhackett from Pew research) played a lot with them, sample poll:

The ease of setting one up, and the option to just click and be done were some of the major selling points. But it wasn't clear if would be just a passing fad or something more. I used one at the #KidneyWk, but there were few responders

Then Matt decided to poll the #nephjc followers after the suPAR chat

And Thomas Hiemstra decided to design his next #DreamRCT on therapy for Membranous nephropathy with a series of tweets:

Second scenario

And it wasn't long before Graham Abra re-ran an older question on the utility of urine eosinophils in allergic interstitial nephritis

another one on the duration of steroids in SLE, in remission

So we guess polls on twitter are here to say. Nephrology tweeps find it awesome (and I can say so with confidence, backed by facts, or shall we say, a poll?)

Swapnil Hiremath

Kidney Week Wrap-up: How will we remember #KidneyWk 2015?

Kidney Week 2015 may be remembered for a number of different social media moments. The Tweet-Up was a raging success and finally broke through to become what Matt and I envisioned at the Denver Kidney Week in 2015. The success of the tweet-up was largely driven by Satellite Healthcare and their invaluable assistance with promotion and logistics. We can’t thank them enough. Additionally Kidney Week 2015 was marked by both a NephJC and NephMadness poster presentation. This Kidney Week, Matt was invited to give a talk on electronic medical education and he crushed it. But the biggest event, the one I hope we remember 2015 for, was the graduation of the first class of interns from the Nephrology Social Media Collective (NSMC).

Matt, Scherly and Chi with their diplomas and #DreamRCT mugs

Matt, Scherly and Chi with their diplomas and #DreamRCT mugs

We had four very different interns and they each had individually unique experiences with the internship:

Scherly Leon is in her last year of nephrology fellowship and is on a mission. She was already the ASN Public Policy Fellow when she started the Social Media internship. She is tuning her Twitter feed to be a carefully crafted curation of nephrology and social justice content. If you aren’t following Scherly (https://twitter.com/SLeonMD), you are doing it wrong. I think everyone is excited to see what she does with her growing skills as a public physician.

Chi Chu was the only intern who was not a nephrologist and we needed to apply more thought on how to make his experience particularly relevant for him. Chi participated in all of the events and his Which nephrotoxic antibiotic are you? was epic. Likewise his DreamRCT entry was equal parts creative and audacious. He will make an awesome nephrologist someday...if we are lucky enough to get him.

Hector Madariaga was a natural for the NSMC internship and did great work from day one. However, by June it was clear that we were under-utilizing him. So we brought him into NephJC in a more formal way. For the last six-months Hector has been NephJC’s chief archivist. He is in charge of creating the Storify’s from every chat. We hope he will continue to be a key member of the NephJC team. Future editor-in-chief?

Nikhil Shah is the intern who least needed the NSMC internship. He was doing great work before the internship and we just hitched our wagon to his shooting star. His SocialKidney project is an essential tool for tracking social media conversations online. His inspirational story on how he got hooked on nephrology was picked up by MedPage today.  It will be great to have his creativity on the NSMC team in the future.

There were several more interns in the inaugural class:

The fifth student was us. We learned a lot about what does and does not work in a social media internship. We are going to be better next year. We got lucky by requiring participation in NephJC, that turned out to be an exceptional learning tool. But only because the interns didn’t merely tune in and lurk, but actively participated and engaged in the chats. It was a great (if not accidental) flipped classroom experience.

With the graduation of our inaugural class we are excited to open the application period for the second class of NSMC interns. If you are interested or have questions, feel free to send us an e-mail. If you want to apply for a spot drop us an e-mail and explain:

  • Who you are 
  • Why you want to do the social media internship
  • What experience do you already have with social media (Do not be embarrassed to say none. Do not be embarrassed to say you are really good at Facebook quizes)

The due date for the application is January 24. We will make our decisions and start the program on February 1

 Send applications to NephrologyJC@gmail.com


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#NephJC does #pericytes - part 1

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Not #parasites or ... #pedicure?

This was a fantastic chat last night, with great questions from Mal Parmar, Scott Brimble, Dylan Burger and others; clear and articulate answers from Ben Humphreys - and a link heavy tweeting from Matt Sparks. The transcript will read almost like a review article - or commentary.

Stay Tuned for the EU/African chat, occurring in just over 2 hours at 8 pm *BST* - with first author Rafael Kramann joinin in this time.

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In the Literature...

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We mentioned the #MICE project in the newsletter a few days ago (what newsletter?? Check out and sign up - low volume, once a week, will keep you updated) - authored by Tejas Desai, Edgar Lerma, Ryan Madanick et al. It's published on the Winnower platform and has already accumulated some interesting reviews, including Chi Chu & Francesco. Two in particular stand out for their insightful comments - out-rivalling any peer review you may have seen, by Len Starnes and David Goldfarb, the latter written in his incomparable signature style.

Another fun paper (CoI alert: includes Swapnil and Joel as co-authors) is a 'Ten Steps for Setting up an Online Journal Club' - available here ($walled). This was a fun experience - crowd-sourced, written from start to end in a matter of days, and shepherded quite ably by Teresa Chan to publication. 

The thing that gets us to the thing...

Matt and I wrote a wrap-up post for NephMadness that went up on MedScape today. Please go read it. In it we explain what we are trying to do with the various social media events and projects we promote for nephrology:

“We have established an informal curriculum of digital mentorship. The goal is to provide a vibrant community of always-available, academically minded nephrologists who are interested in sharing their skills, knowledge, and wisdom. Most of these conversations are spontaneous. Examples include recent discussions on the relationship between sodium linked glucose transporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors (a new drug for the treatment of diabetes) and diabetic ketoacidosis and another about whether one should stop antiplatelet agents before kidney biopsy. The tweets were a mixture of references, pithy bits of insight, images from primary sources, and opinions.”

NephJC and NephMadness are stepping stones to this always available online community. They are important for setting the tone and attracting people who share our vision and academic values. But in the end, NephJC isn't the thing it is just the means of getting to the ultimate goal of a viable, self-perpetuating, professional network, of academically-minded, nephrologists particiapating in social media. I was reminded of this while watching the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire. The plot turns on an old article written by the protagonist, Gordon Clark, where he states that computers aren't the thing, but rather the thing that gets us to the thing.

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#NephJC has RSS subscribers?

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A few months ago, we mentioned how to subscribe our feed with RSS. 

At that time, we had one subscriber (Swapnil) - and to our great surprise, it seems to be that RSS is back. Just see below:

Unless there are spam RSS subscriptions somehow....

In some other news, we would like to thank Marjorie Lazoff for mentioning us in the LITFL blog  - go check out their literature review here. 

Swapnil Hiremath, M.D.