The Impact of Intensive Medical and Surgical Control of Diabetes on Experimental Rodent Diabetic Kidney Disease.
Wellcome Trust
University College Dublin
Background:   Kidney disease affects 12 in every 100 people, most commonly due to diabetes. Kidney damage due to diabetes often persists despite treatment with the best available drugs. Most people with kidney damage from diabetes are overweight. Drug and surgical weight loss treatments help overweight people to lose more weight for longer periods of time, improve quality of life, and reduce the chance of dying. Helping people with diabetes to lose weight also slows kidney damage. How this happens remains poorly understood.    Approach:   We will study kidney damage caused by diabetes in rats as they age. We will also treat rats with diabetic kidney damage with drug and surgical obesity treatments to better understand how weight loss protects kidney tissue.    Expected Impact:   We will present our results at international scientific meetings and publish our results in scientific papers. We will present our results to patients attending our dedicated weight loss clinic for people with kidney disease, and involve patient stakeholders in planning future studies. Our studies may result in more people with diabetic kidney damage receiving weight loss treatments and may highlight important targets for new therapies for diabetic kidney damage.
2.1 Biological and endogenous factors