Medical Explanation

  Chronic kidney disease is a broad term that includes subtle decreases in kidney function  that develop over a minimum of three months.  In contrast, acute kidney injury refers to any deterioration in kidney function that  happens in less than three months.  Now the kidney’s job is to regulate what’s in the blood, so they might remove waste,  make sure electrolyte levels are steady, regulate the overall amount of water, and  even make hormones - the kidneys do a lot of stuff!  Blood gets into the kidney through the renal artery, and once inside it goes gets into  tiny clumps of arterioles called glomeruli where it’s initially filtered, and the filtrate  which is the stuff that gets filtered out, moves into the renal tubule.  The rate at which this filtration takes place is known as the glomerular filtration rate or  GFR. In a normal healthy person, this is somewhere around 100-120 milliliter of fluid filtered  per minute per 1.73 m2 of body surface area.  The value is slightly less in

  You’ve probably come out of a particularly sad movie and said something like:  "Man, that was depressing."  In this case, you’re talking about how, at that moment,  the movie made you feel sad, discouraged, hopeless, or anxious.  You probably wouldn’t say something like:  “Man, that movie was clinically depressing.”  The latter expression refers to a much different state of depression.  Clinical depression, which is sometimes called a major depressive disorder or unipolar depression,  is a serious mental disorder that has a lifetime incidence of up to 20% in women  and 12% in men,  making it one of the most common reasons people seek out mental health services. That being said, as well as being relatively common,  clinical depression is, in fact, very serious.  It’s so serious that it interferes with someone’s day-to-day life,  like working, studying, eating, and sleeping,  essentially leading to this overall feeling that life isn’t enjoyable.  But what causes someone to fe