In contrast with other treatments, such as steroids or immunosuppressive drugs, the dietary treatment, though often difficult for patients to follow, has no side effects, says Walser. The diet excluded such high-protein foods as meat, fish, poultry, cheese and milk and included supplemental tablets of amino acids, the building blocks of protein. Evidently, some unidentified component of a regular diet was perpetuating the loss of urinary protein. What's clear from our findings is that the common opinion that kidney disease patients shouldn't be given severely protein-restricted diets needs to be reconsidered. Hopkins researchers plan to repeat the study with a larger number of patients.
Nephrotic syndrome is marked by damage to the glomeruli, the kidney's filtering units.
This causes severe loss of protein from the blood into the urine, severe fluid retention and extremely high blood cholesterol. The syndrome may result from diabetes mellitus, severe high blood pressure or other causes and often leads to the need for dialysis or transplantation. Previous Hopkins studies have shown that a very low protein diet before dialysis may prolong the lives of some kidney failure patients after they start dialysis and may postpone the start of dialysis for others.