Chronic Kidney Disease

A progressive, usually irreversible loss of kidney function over months or years, most commonly caused by diabetes mellitus and hypertension, leading in its most advanced stage (kidney failure) to a buildup of waste and fluid that is fatal without dialysis or transplantation. The English physician Richard Bright provided the first systematic clinical description of chronic kidney disease in 1827, correlating dropsy, protein in the urine, and diseased kidneys found at autopsy; the condition was known as Bright's disease for much of the following century before modern nephrology reorganized it around kidney function itself rather than a single eponymous syndrome. Dialysis, developed as a practical treatment from the 1940s onward, is this atlas's own separately held treatment entity for the disease's most advanced stage.