A Prospective Study on Complement Activation Distinguishes Focal Segmental Glomerulosclerosis from Minimal Change Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
IntroductionMinimal change disease (MCD) and focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) are related podocytopathies with distinct kidney outcomes. Surprisingly, elevated urinary activation fragments have been found in FSGS despite little complement deposition on immunofluorescence staining. Whether complement activation distinguishes FSGS from MCD, participating in the development of segmental lesions, remains unknown.MethodsWe performed an observational study in subjects with MCD and FSGS, and proteinuria ≥ 1 g/g of creatinine. We included both primary and secondary or unknown causes. We compared urinary fragments of terminal pathway activation, sC5b9 and C5a expressed as creatinine ratios, between MCD and FSGS.ResultsPatients with FSGS (n=41) had a serum albumin of 31±10 g/L and proteinuria of 5.1 (2.6-9.1) g/g at sampling, while those with MCD (n=15) had a lower serum albumin (22±9 g/L, p=0.002), and a proteinuria of 3.8 (1.9-7.7) g/g (p=0.40). Urinary sC5b9 and C5a were 8.7 (1.7-52.3) and 1.26 (0.45-1.84) μg/mmol of creatinine, respectively in FSGS subjects, compared to 0.8 (0.0-1.5) and 0.06 (0.01-0.15) μg/mmol of creatinine in MCD (p<0.001), respectively. We found no association between urinary complement fragments and age, eGFR, or chronic kidney lesions. When analyzing samples with proteinurias ≥ 3 g/g, the c-statistics for urinary sC5b9 and C5a were 0.96 and 1.00, respectively, in differentiating FSGS from MCD.ConclusionWe found no urinary complement activation fragments in MCD, in comparison to FSGS, despite similar levels of proteinuria. This suggests a role for complement activation in the pathogenesis of FSGS and provides an additional tool for distinguishing these two entities.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".