A recently published nomenclature by a “Kidney Disease Improving Global Outcomes” (KDIGO) Consensus Conference suggested that the word “kidney” should be used in medical writings instead of “renal” or “nephro” when referring to kidney disease and kidney health. Whereas the decade-old move to use “kidney” more frequently should be supported when communicating with the public-at-large, such as the World Kidney Day, or in English speaking countries in communications with patients, care-partners, and non-medical persons, our point of view is that “renal” or “nephro” should not be removed from scientific and technical writings. Instead, the terms can coexist and be used in their relevant contexts. Cardiologists use “heart” and “cardio” as appropriate such as “heart failure” and “cardiac care units” and have not replaced “cardiovascular” with “heartvessel”, for instance. Likewise, in nephrology, we consider that “chronic kidney disease” and “continuous renal replacement therapy” should coexist. We suggest that in scientific writings and technical communications, the words “renal” and “nephro” and their derivatives are more appropriate and should be freely used without any pressure by medical journals to compel patients, care-partners, healthcare providers, researchers and other stakeholders to change their selected words and terminologies. We call to embrace the terms “kidney”, “renal” and “nephro” as they are used in different contexts and ask that scientific and medical journals not impose terminology restrictions for kidney disease and kidney health. The choice should be at the discretion of the authors, in the different contexts including in scientific journals.
About The Expert
Kamyar Kalantar-Zadeh
Peter A McCullough
Sanjay Kumar Agarwal
Srinivasan Beddhu
Mona Boaz
Annette Bruchfeld
Philippe Chauveau
Jing Chen
Patricia de Sequera
Nieltje Gedney
Thomas A Golper
Malini Gupta
Tess Harris
Lori Hartwell
Vassilios Liakopoulos
Joel D Kopple
Csaba P Kovesdy
Iain C Macdougall
Johannes F E Mann
Donald Molony
Keith C Norris
Jeffrey Perlmutter
Connie M Rhee
Leonardo V Riella
Steven D Weisbord
Carmine Zoccali
David Goldsmith
References
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