Urinary Vacuolar Casts Are a Unique Type of Casts in Advanced Proteinuric Glomerulopathies
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Key Points Vacuolar casts are a distinct type of casts identifiable by urinary sediment microscopy. Identification of urinary vacuolar casts is associated with the presence of an advanced and severe form of a proteinuric glomerular disease. Background Identification of casts by urinary sediment microscopy is a valuable diagnostic clinical tool for the evaluation of kidney disease. Vacuolar casts are an unrecognized unique type of casts characterized by the presence of nonpolarizable, clear vesicles of various sizes contained within a cast matrix, different from lipid casts, erythrocyte casts, or any other casts. We aimed to gain better understanding of the clinical relevance of these casts by establishing a multinational collaborative group to search for cases in which vacuolar casts were identified. Methods Leveraging an educational social media platform, we conducted a multinational observational study extracting cases of patients who presented with urinary vacuolar casts during evaluation for impaired kidney function. Parameters assessed included degree of proteinuria and kidney dysfunction, clinical and histopathological diagnosis, and severity of renal parenchymal scarring on biopsy. A control group of patients without vacuolar casts was included for comparison. Results Forty-six patients with urinary vacuolar casts were compiled from six countries. Nephrotic range proteinuria (82%), glomerular etiology (98%), and advanced CKD stage (62% 3B-5) were salient features. Histopathological diagnosis was available in 26 (57%) patients. Combining clinical and pathological diagnoses, diabetic nephropathy (48%), arterionephrosclerosis (30%), podocytopathies (15%), and proliferative glomerulonephritides (15%) accounted for most patients. Vacuolization of tubules or podocytes was present in 61% of the specimens. When compared with patients with histopathological diagnoses in which vacuolar casts were not found ( n =186), patients with vacuolar casts more frequently had a glomerular etiology (100% versus 71%, P = 0.002), had greater proteinuria (median urine protein-to-creatinine 10.3 versus 2.2 g/g, P < 0.001), and had greater proportion of patients with ≥30% glomerular obsolescence (46% versus 20%, P = 0.003). Conclusions Thus, urinary vacuolar casts are strongly associated with advanced glomerulopathies with severe proteinuria. Future studies should examine their origin, composition, and prognostic value. Podcast This article contains a podcast at https://dts.podtrac.com/redirect.mp3/www.asn-online.org/media/podcast/K360/2024_01_26_KID0000000000000346.mp3
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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 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| 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".