Paper in Nature this week shows impressive longevity gains with rapamycin an mTOR inhibitor. We use these drugs now to treat kidney cancer. http://feeds.wired.com/~r/wiredscience/~3/V7UA3NJ-ed4/ Big drawback to rapamycin: markedly increased risk of cancer. So perhaps a person would live longer only to develop some sort of tumor. Still an interesting and unexpected finding. By the way watch for rapamycin hype starting right away.

Urine test to screen for viral threat to kidney transplants Apparently polyomavirus infections are a common cause of kidney transplant loss and now there is a rapid noninvasive way to screen for this. Reading between the lines in the article linked above one gets the sense that there is not a good treatment to abort the progression of polyomavirus nephropathy. So this begs the question what good is a simple test for a disease if there's nothing that can be done about a positive result? There's the headscratcher of the day.

Diabetes is the most frequent cause of kidney failure accounting for nearly 45 percent of new cases in America. Centers for Disease Control have revealed that over 17 million Americans have diabetes. Diabetes is also considered as the number one cause of chronic kidney disease (CKD). Patients with type 2 diabetes once known as non-insulin-dependent diabetes mellitus or adult-onset diabetes are at an immense risk of acquiring kidney disease.

Thiamine may hold key to reversing diabetic kidney disease

Physicians say that increasingly they are seeing younger people and children with kidney stones which can be highly painful and they wonder if its not due to the increasing number of obese children. There are no hard and fast numbers on the amount of children who are presenting with kidney stones but childrens clinics say that their numbers are up. "There is very little available on pediatric stone disease in particular " said Dr. Caleb Nelson a urologist at Children's Hospital Boston.

A drug that is currently in use to treat patients with circulatory problems may also be of benefit to those who have kidney disease which has been caused by diabetes. Pentoxifylline has been shown to decrease proteinuria which is the abnormal leaking of protein into the urine. Two articles in the September issue of the American Journal of Kidney Diseases offer the findings. "When kidneys are healthy very little or no protein appears in the urine " says Dr. Kerry Willis who is the Senior Vice President for Scientific Activities at the National Kidney Foundation.