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The exciting news is that Hill's Pet Nutrition together with Bayer Animal Health have agreed to sponsor the Renal Standardization Project. This project will be under the co-chair leadership of Drs. Larry Cowgill and David Polzin, and is anticipated to take approximately four years to complete.

The final outcome of this project will be to provide:

• A publication of a standardized system for classification of pathological lesions in canine glomeruli that is accepted and adopted throughout the world and that is based on a refinement of the system currently used in human medicine
• A description of the prevalence of precisely defined canine protein-losing kidney diseases in a large population of dogs and the correlation of the history, physical examination findings, and clinical laboratory data with the pathological disease classification
• The production of an atlas of glomerular diseases of the dog where the agreed standardized histopathological classification will be clearly presented together with the data on prevalence of the diseases and the clinical correlates of each major disease. This atlas will serve as a as an educational tool and will ensure widespread dissemination of the results of the project throughout the world.
• The definition of the natural history of progression of the canine kidney diseases defined in the cross-sectional part of this study by longitudinal follow-up of the cases from which biopsy material was submitted. These follow-up data will define the prognosis of each disease when dogs are subjected to current methods of standard care for protein-losing kidney disease.

For a summary of the Renal Standardization Study Group in a printable brochure format, please use the following link:

WSAVA Renal Project Brochure

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WSAVA Renal Standardization Group in the News

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WSAVA Renal Standardization Project - Update February 2008

Through the most generous sponsorship of Bayer Animal Health and Hills Pet Nutrition this very exciting project has finally come to fruition. With the acquisition of essential diagnostic equipment (Aperio scanning equipment) and Drs. Larry Cowgill and David Polzin and their committee members will be able to commence work on this project shortly.

Glomerular disorders are an important cause of kidney disease in dogs and cats, but their diagnostic evaluation, classification, and management remain enigmatic and uncharacterized compared to other renal pathology. Accurate identification and appropriate treatment of canine glomerular diseases can be expected to yield consequential improvements in clinical outcomes for this large cohort of affected animals. In human beings, specific glomerular diseases are characterized (and thus are identified) by their light microscopic, immunopathologic, and electron microscopic features which are correlated with the particular clinical and clinicopathologic findings that are exhibited by affected patients.

Diagnosis of a patient's glomerular disease provides insights into the disorder's pathogenesis and prognosis, as well as guidelines for appropriate treatment. While veterinary pathologists have attempted to characterize glomerular diseases in dogs in a similar manner, they have based their diagnoses primarily on light microscopic findings. These efforts largely have failed to yield a consensus nomenclature, morphologic characterization, and adequate and accurate results. This failure underscores the importance of a uniform classification scheme based on expanded immunologic and ultrastructural evaluation in renal disease diagnosis. The purpose of this initiative is to employ the use of all three diagnostic modalities, as used in human nephropathology, to accurately characterize glomerular disease in proteinuric dogs, and to relate these findings to clinicopathologic presentation and outcome. Our long-term goal is to better understand and evaluate and thus optimize the medical management of dogs with proteinuric renal disorders by identifying distinct glomerular diseases for which specific prognoses and therapeutic guidelines can be provided.

This proposal achieves this objective by systematically evaluating tissue specimens obtained from proteinuric dogs and cats world-wide and to collect information about the clinical and clinicopathologic features of their illnesses. Results of these evaluations will be collated and interpreted by a team of veterinary nephrologists and pathologists who will use existing standards for classifying the morphology of human glomerular disease to formulate pathologic diagnoses correlated with the clinical features of the diseases in affected dogs and cats. The clinical utility of the diagnostic scheme will be established by prospective study of initially at least 100 cases, and ultimately of 500 cases.

Anticipated outcomes of this project are: 1) identification of a large cohort of dogs and cats in which the clinical outcome of well defined glomerular disorders treated with standard care can be determined, 2) creation of the diagnostic infrastructure needed to conduct controlled clinical trials of therapy for dogs and cats with glomerular diseases, and 3) publication of a book that describes and illustrates canine glomerular diseases using the diagnostic scheme that is developed.