Grant: Doctoral: Vanier Canada Graduate Scholarships

Kidney disease affects over 25 million North Americans. While kidney failure can progress to the need for a kidney transplant or dialysis treatments, people with milder kidney failure are far more likely to die of heart disease before their kidneys fail completely. This is partly due to problems with phosphate balance, which results in a build-up of calcium and phosphate in the walls of blood vessels. The urine is the major way that extra phosphate is removed from the body. We have shown in our previous experiments that the kidneys have difficulty removing phosphate even when kidney failure is only mild and well before kidney failure is recognized in the clinic by health care providers. Our animal experiments will investigate how phosphate is handled in early kidney failure and how that affects blood vessels. The results of these animal studies will help us to develop a new clinical test to diagnose problems with phosphate removal in humans at a time that is much earlier than we are currently capable of. We call this clinical test the "oral phosphate tolerance test" and it will be used to evaluate how well patients respond to a challenge of phosphate. Kidney failure will affect 1 in 8 Canadians and this number will be even higher in the future due to obesity, diabetes and an aging population. Moreover, phosphate is being used widely as a food preservative. Targeting patients at risk for phosphate imbalance earlier in the course of their kidney failure may decrease the risk of heart disease in this population.