Nephrotic syndrome in adult Africans in Nairobi
Date
1972Author
Barr, RD
Rees, PH
Cordy, PE
Kungu, A
Woodger, BA
Cameron, HM
Type
ArticleLanguage
enMetadata
Show full item recordAbstract
The adult nephrotic syndrome as met with in Nairobi is predominantly encountered in young sophisticated African women, most of whom began to use skin-lightening creams containing mercury before the symptomatic onset of their illness. The particular form of mercury involved is well known to cause the nephrotic syndrome in other circumstances-for example, when applied to the skin in the treatment of psoriasis. In these circumstances the pathogenetic mechanism is thought to be of an idiosyncratic type. The use of mercury-containing skin-lightening creams in the patients studied seemed to be particularly associated with a "minimal-change" ("light-negative") renal glomerular lesion, this lesion being present in half of the patients. The prognosis in this group of patients seems remarkably good, with 50% entering remission, 77% of these doing so spontaneously on discontinuing the use of the creams
URI
http://erepository.uonbi.ac.ke:8080/xmlui/handle/123456789/29162http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/4111681
Citation
Br Med J. 1972 Apr 15;2(5806):131-4Publisher
Department of Pathology, University of Nairobi
Collections
- Faculty of Health Sciences (FHS) [10377]