Nick Henry first experienced the symptoms of kidney disease in 2004, shortly after the 19-year-old had a severe reaction to a spider bite. "I woke up one morning, and I was just swollen from head to toe," he recalls. But doctors managed Henry's disease, allowing him to return to his unusually active lifestyle—including baseball, softball, basketball, flag football, golf, and fishing—in his northeast Louisiana hometown of West Monroe. Shortly after he witnessed the death of his mother in a motor scooter accident in 2012, however, Henry's renal health took a dramatic turn for the worse. "It's almost as if my body went into shock," he says. "Within a couple months, boom, I started swelling up again."
This is the medical history of Nick Henry who first came to know in 2004 that he was suffering from kidney disease. Later on he was diagnosed with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (FSGS) after a biopsy test was done. It is considered as a severe condition of kidney disease, in which the kidney’s glomeruli, the microscopic filtration units, start filtering albumin along with fluid and waste products. Albumin is an essential protein our body. In this scenario, blood chemistry gets disturbed and fluid enters into tissues all over the body by infiltrating blood vessels. Seeing Henry’s condition in July 2014, his doctors removed both damaged kidneys and transplanted a kidney from Nate, who was identical to Henry – means they both were twins.
Unfortunately, Henry found his body started swelling again just in a day of the transplant. He was again undergone for a urine test in which doctors found that the transplanted kidney was again attacked by FSGS. This recurrence was unpredictable and never imagined by doctors. Seeing this event, I can say that the recurrence of FSGS is faster than cancer because my father was a cancer patient and in my father’s case cancer relapsed two or three months after the surgery was done.
His transplant doctor, Neeraj Singh of Louisiana State University in Shreveport, says the recurrence was "one of the most dramatic cases I've seen."
Henry’s case is very unique in medical history since the kidney transplantation was started. After this devastating result, Henry was totally relied on dialysis to survive. He met with a kidney specialist named Jochen Reiser in Chicago, Illinois for further treatment. Reiser is chairperson of internal medicine at Rush University Medical Center.
Reiser was not unknown to such kidney transplant failure. He came to know about it around two decades ago. He said
"there is something in the blood circulating that attacks the kidney. And we were out to catch that."
According to Reiser and his colleague, a protein in blood circulating called soluble urokinase plasminogen activator receptor (suPAR) is the culprit of kidney disease, however, it is still not proved. Reiser’s guessing became true when he examined blood test reports of Henry twins. The level of suPAR in Henry was higher than Nate who was healthy. Reiser is confident that suPAR damaged Henry’s kidney. However, others don’t believe that suPAR is responsible for FSGS.
I have mentioned only one case here. If you want to know another case, then visit : http://www.sciencemag.org/news/2018/04/whats-your-risk-kidney-disease-heart-attack-or-diabetes-single-molecule-can-tell?utm_campaign=news_weekly_2018-04-20&et_rid=284057739&et_cid=1984859