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joel topf
NephJC 2026 Fall Pledge Drive

Help keep NephJC a vital, original, and unbiased source of medical education.

NephJC 2026 Fall Pledge Drive
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Brian Rifkin
REFINe-ing AI’s Role in Nephrology Diagnosis

This week, we will discuss the use of LLMs for the diagnosis of complex nephrology cases. Can AI help nephrologists nail the correct diagnosis?

REFINe-ing AI’s Role in Nephrology Diagnosis
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Akshaya J
Too sweet to be true? Prophylactic SGLT2 ...

MERCURI-2 reports that dapagliflozin cuts postoperative AKI after cardiac surgery, but the headline result is mostly a urine-output story, not a creatinine one. That matters: urine output after surgery is easily swayed by anesthesia, fluid shifts, vasopressors, and a diuretic drug in the mix. Until dapagliflozin shows it protects kidney function, not just urine output.

Too sweet to be true? Prophylactic SGLT2 inhibitors before cardiac surgery
Background
Cristina Adriana Popa
Buffering without benefit? The SODa-BIC study

This week, we will discuss SODaBIC trial: with ICU acidosis driven by multiple overlapping mechanisms, is bicarbonate infusion supported by robust evidence, or does it persist mainly out of habit rather than physiology?

Buffering without benefit? The SODa-BIC study
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Pallavi Prasad
Beyond Diabetic Kidney Disease: FIND-ing ...

FIND-CKD extends finerenone beyond diabetic kidney disease, showing slower eGFR decline and sustained albuminuria reduction in non-diabetic CKD. While the benefits are modest and cardiovascular effects remain uncertain, the trial opens the door to broader use of nsMRAs and raises important questions about combination therapy with SGLT2 inhibitors.

Beyond Diabetic Kidney Disease: FIND-ing Finerenone's Next Role

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The Neph-Twitterverse discovers Twitter polls

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A few weeks ago, the folks at twitter announced they were rolling out Twitter polls. Previously, tweeps would use manually counting responses or the RT-if-you-agree Fav-if-you-don't approach. This is how the polls were supposed to work:

So what, you might say? A few users (notably @conradhackett from Pew research) played a lot with them, sample poll:

The ease of setting one up, and the option to just click and be done were some of the major selling points. But it wasn't clear if would be just a passing fad or something more. I used one at the #KidneyWk, but there were few responders

Then Matt decided to poll the #nephjc followers after the suPAR chat

And Thomas Hiemstra decided to design his next #DreamRCT on therapy for Membranous nephropathy with a series of tweets:

Second scenario

And it wasn't long before Graham Abra re-ran an older question on the utility of urine eosinophils in allergic interstitial nephritis

another one on the duration of steroids in SLE, in remission

So we guess polls on twitter are here to say. Nephrology tweeps find it awesome (and I can say so with confidence, backed by facts, or shall we say, a poll?)

Swapnil Hiremath

Kidney Week Wrap-up: How will we remember #KidneyWk 2015?

Kidney Week 2015 may be remembered for a number of different social media moments. The Tweet-Up was a raging success and finally broke through to become what Matt and I envisioned at the Denver Kidney Week in 2015. The success of the tweet-up was largely driven by Satellite Healthcare and their invaluable assistance with promotion and logistics. We can’t thank them enough. Additionally Kidney Week 2015 was marked by both a NephJC and NephMadness poster presentation. This Kidney Week, Matt was invited to give a talk on electronic medical education and he crushed it. But the biggest event, the one I hope we remember 2015 for, was the graduation of the first class of interns from the Nephrology Social Media Collective (NSMC).

Matt, Scherly and Chi with their diplomas and #DreamRCT mugs

Matt, Scherly and Chi with their diplomas and #DreamRCT mugs

We had four very different interns and they each had individually unique experiences with the internship:

Scherly Leon is in her last year of nephrology fellowship and is on a mission. She was already the ASN Public Policy Fellow when she started the Social Media internship. She is tuning her Twitter feed to be a carefully crafted curation of nephrology and social justice content. If you aren’t following Scherly (https://twitter.com/SLeonMD), you are doing it wrong. I think everyone is excited to see what she does with her growing skills as a public physician.

Chi Chu was the only intern who was not a nephrologist and we needed to apply more thought on how to make his experience particularly relevant for him. Chi participated in all of the events and his Which nephrotoxic antibiotic are you? was epic. Likewise his DreamRCT entry was equal parts creative and audacious. He will make an awesome nephrologist someday...if we are lucky enough to get him.

Hector Madariaga was a natural for the NSMC internship and did great work from day one. However, by June it was clear that we were under-utilizing him. So we brought him into NephJC in a more formal way. For the last six-months Hector has been NephJC’s chief archivist. He is in charge of creating the Storify’s from every chat. We hope he will continue to be a key member of the NephJC team. Future editor-in-chief?

Nikhil Shah is the intern who least needed the NSMC internship. He was doing great work before the internship and we just hitched our wagon to his shooting star. His SocialKidney project is an essential tool for tracking social media conversations online. His inspirational story on how he got hooked on nephrology was picked up by MedPage today.  It will be great to have his creativity on the NSMC team in the future.

There were several more interns in the inaugural class:

The fifth student was us. We learned a lot about what does and does not work in a social media internship. We are going to be better next year. We got lucky by requiring participation in NephJC, that turned out to be an exceptional learning tool. But only because the interns didn’t merely tune in and lurk, but actively participated and engaged in the chats. It was a great (if not accidental) flipped classroom experience.

With the graduation of our inaugural class we are excited to open the application period for the second class of NSMC interns. If you are interested or have questions, feel free to send us an e-mail. If you want to apply for a spot drop us an e-mail and explain:

  • Who you are 
  • Why you want to do the social media internship
  • What experience do you already have with social media (Do not be embarrassed to say none. Do not be embarrassed to say you are really good at Facebook quizes)

The due date for the application is January 24. We will make our decisions and start the program on February 1

 Send applications to NephrologyJC@gmail.com


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#NephJC does #pericytes - part 1

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Not #parasites or ... #pedicure?

This was a fantastic chat last night, with great questions from Mal Parmar, Scott Brimble, Dylan Burger and others; clear and articulate answers from Ben Humphreys - and a link heavy tweeting from Matt Sparks. The transcript will read almost like a review article - or commentary.

American Chat Transcript

Stay Tuned for the EU/African chat, occurring in just over 2 hours at 8 pm *BST* - with first author Rafael Kramann joinin in this time.

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In the Literature...

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We mentioned the #MICE project in the newsletter a few days ago (what newsletter?? Check out and sign up - low volume, once a week, will keep you updated) - authored by Tejas Desai, Edgar Lerma, Ryan Madanick et al. It's published on the Winnower platform and has already accumulated some interesting reviews, including Chi Chu & Francesco. Two in particular stand out for their insightful comments - out-rivalling any peer review you may have seen, by Len Starnes and David Goldfarb, the latter written in his incomparable signature style.

Another fun paper (CoI alert: includes Swapnil and Joel as co-authors) is a 'Ten Steps for Setting up an Online Journal Club' - available here ($walled). This was a fun experience - crowd-sourced, written from start to end in a matter of days, and shepherded quite ably by Teresa Chan to publication. 

The thing that gets us to the thing...

Matt and I wrote a wrap-up post for NephMadness that went up on MedScape today. Please go read it. In it we explain what we are trying to do with the various social media events and projects we promote for nephrology:

“We have established an informal curriculum of digital mentorship. The goal is to provide a vibrant community of always-available, academically minded nephrologists who are interested in sharing their skills, knowledge, and wisdom. Most of these conversations are spontaneous. Examples include recent discussions on the relationship between sodium linked glucose transporter-2 (SGLT2) inhibitors (a new drug for the treatment of diabetes) and diabetic ketoacidosis and another about whether one should stop antiplatelet agents before kidney biopsy. The tweets were a mixture of references, pithy bits of insight, images from primary sources, and opinions.”

NephJC and NephMadness are stepping stones to this always available online community. They are important for setting the tone and attracting people who share our vision and academic values. But in the end, NephJC isn't the thing it is just the means of getting to the ultimate goal of a viable, self-perpetuating, professional network, of academically-minded, nephrologists particiapating in social media. I was reminded of this while watching the pilot of Halt and Catch Fire. The plot turns on an old article written by the protagonist, Gordon Clark, where he states that computers aren't the thing, but rather the thing that gets us to the thing.

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#NephJC has RSS subscribers?

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A few months ago, we mentioned how to subscribe our feed with RSS. 

At that time, we had one subscriber (Swapnil) - and to our great surprise, it seems to be that RSS is back. Just see below:

Unless there are spam RSS subscriptions somehow....

In some other news, we would like to thank Marjorie Lazoff for mentioning us in the LITFL blog  - go check out their literature review here. 

Swapnil Hiremath, M.D.

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Humble beginnings

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I had thought of starting a Nephrology Journal club ever since I wrote about eJC on PBFluids. In fact if you look at my suggestions for how to improve CJASN eJC, you will see the skeleton for the current #NephJC. But ideas are cheap and I never did anything about it.

In the middle of NephMadness last year I received a tweet from from Swapnil suggesting that someone do a Nephrology Twitter Journal Club. I told him it was a great idea but that I had my hands full with NephMadness and that he should write me after the contest ended.

Literally moments after we announced the winner of NephMadness, Swapnil e-mails me about the journal club. I told him to do some research on how twitter journal clubs work and write a post on Medium. I half hoped he would drop the ball and go away but he published it on April 17. A week later we collaborated on a tighter introduction, also published on Medium (we didn't yet have our SquareSpace sight) And five days after that we held our first NephJC.