Genetic predisposition to acute kidney injury – a systematic review

BACKGROUND: The risk of an individual to develop an acute kidney injury (AKI), or its severity, cannot be reliably predicted by common clinical risk factors. Whether genetic risk factors have an explanatory role poses an interesting question, however. Thus, we conducted a systematic literature review regarding genetic predisposition to AKI or outcome of AKI patients. METHODS: We searched Ovid SP (MEDLINE) and EMBASE databases and found 4027 references to AKI. Based on titles and abstracts, we approved 37 articles for further analysis. Nine were published only as abstracts, leaving 28 original articles in the final analysis. We extracted the first author, year of publication, study design, clinical setting, number of studied patients, patients with AKI, ethnicity of patients, studied polymorphisms, endpoints, AKI definition, phenotype, significant findings, and data for quality scoring from each article. We summarized the findings and scored the quality of articles. RESULTS: The articles were quite heterogeneous and of moderate quality (mean 6.4 of 10). CONCLUSIONS: Despite different gene polymorphisms with suggested associations with development or severity or outcome of AKI, definitive conclusions would require replication of associations in independent cohort studies and, preferably a hypothesis-free study design. ELECTRONIC SUPPLEMENTARY MATERIAL: The online version of this article (doi:10.1186/s12882-015-0190-6) contains supplementary material, which is available to authorized users.