Chronic kidney disease is a growing problem worldwide and in the aging U.S. population.
Chronic kidney disease is a growing problem worldwide and in the aging U.S. population. But could the groundwork for this progressive disease have been laid while its victims were still in utero?
Newly launched research at the University of Pittsburgh School of Public Health seeks to determine if pregnant mothers’ environmental exposure to toxic metals impacts kidney development in their babies, setting the stage for a problem that doesn’t become apparent until the baby is an adult.
The National Institutes of Health recently awarded a three-year, $2.2 million “high risk, high reward” grant to Dr. Alison Sanders, an assistant professor in Pitt’s Department of Environmental and Occupational Health, to assemble a transdisciplinary team of scientists who will collect data and explore the hypothesis from multiple angles.
“In the last two decades, there’s been a lot of research connecting a range of conditions, from cardiovascular to behavioral, to toxic metal exposures in utero. But we think of chronic kidney disease as a late-stage adult disease so it hasn’t received the same attention,” Sanders said. “That is starting to change.”
Read more at University Of Pittsburgh
Image: Dr. Alison Sanders
