NKF Spring Clinical Meetings to highlight hot topics for nephrology professionals
The National Kidney Foundation Spring Clinical Meetings, taking place April 9 to 13, in Boston, will provide interprofessional attendees with the latest information on evolving areas of kidney care.
With many important topics to cover and a fixed number of sessions available, the program committee prioritized advancements in science and clinical trials for common chronic kidney disease conditions along with buzz-worthy topics, such as artificial intelligence and disaster preparedness, program chair Sankar D. Navaneethan, MD, MS, MPH, the Garabed Eknoyan MD Endowed Professor of Medicine at Baylor College of Medicine, told Healio | Nephrology News & Issues.
“Worth highlighting are some sessions covering where there have been exciting developments: the advancement in our knowledge of diabetic kidney disease, cardio-kidney connections and how to improve outcomes of our dialysis patients and transplant recipients [and] adoption of precision medicine,” Navaneethan said. “To facilitate adoption of precision medicine, we have a session titled Genetics 101 to guide clinicians about how to use genetic information, what testing to do and how to interpret the results.”
Sessions are categorized along tracks for physicians, trainees, advanced practice providers, pharmacists, nephrology nurses and technicians, nephrology social workers, renal and clinical dietitians and transplant professionals. Attendees are encouraged to sit in on relevant sessions led by interprofessional and multi-disciplinary nephrology professionals.
Several sessions are dedicated to fostering interprofessional and collaborative care, Navaneethan said.
“The field is evolving rapidly. Many of the medications used to treat, for instance, diabetic kidney disease or hypertension, would also be used by cardiologists, endocrinologists and primary care physicians, and dietitians and pharmacists play a vital role in continuing these medications. So, this involves a team-based approach,” he said.
New this year will be oral abstract presentations in addition to the annual session dedicated to late-breaking abstracts.
Navaneethan highlighted several sessions in this year’s program:
- On Friday morning, the J. Michael Lazarus Distinguished Lecture on home dialysis will be delivered by Jeffrey Perl, MD, staff nephrologist at St. Michael’s Hospital, Unity Health in Toronto and associate professor of medicine at the University of Toronto.
- Also, on Friday morning, the Joel D. Kopple Distinguished Lecture will be delivered by Brandon Kistler, PhD, RD, assistant professor in the department of nutrition science and co-director of the clinical and translational nutrition research lab at Purdue University. He will speak about controversies in the management of protein-energy wasting.
- On Saturday morning, the Shaul G. Massry Distinguished Lecture on sepsis-associated AKI will be delivered by Kathleen Liu, MD, professor of medicine and anesthesia in the divisions of nephrology and critical care medicine and medical director of the medical ICU and the apheresis/hemodialysis unit at the University of California, San Francisco.
- A Saturday session on recent updates to Kidney Disease: Improving Global Outcomes guidelines will cover fall prevention, culturally sensitive nutrition recommendations and a core curriculum for CKD education.
- An Ask the Experts session on Saturday will cover aspects of pregnancy care for patients with glomerular disease.
Navaneethan recommends attendees use the Spring Clinical Meetings app to choose sessions that match their needs, developing some specific skills or focusing on specific disease states, and he also recommends attending the lunchtime workshops that cover a broad array of topics. The workshops — three scheduled on Thursday and four on Saturday — require separate ticketing when registering for the meeting. Among them are “Hot Topics in Nephrology Literature: 2025 Edition” and “Right Treatment, Right Patient, Right Time: Getting Precise in Nephrology.”
- For more information:
- Sankar D. Navaneethan, MD, MS, MPH, can be reached at sankar.navaneethan@bcm.edu.
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