Objective:

Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a clinical syndrome characterized by accumulation of nitrogenous waste products depending on the rapid loss of renal function and abnormalities in the fluid/electrolyte balance within hours or days.

Methods:

Whereas the chronic renal failure (CRF) is being studied extensively on epidemiology, the literature on ABH epidemiology is inadequate. In this article, patients diagnosed AKI were examined by etiologic factors, accompanying diseases, need for dialysis and the risk of death and we planned to concentrate our long term efforts on factors that can be corrected. We evaluated the effect of etiological factors on the geriatric population in AKI.

Results:

The study was conducted retrospectively in 168 patients (male: 95, female: 73) who were admitted to our Internal Medicine Clinics with the diagnosis of AKI patients. The mean age of the patients was 69±15.5 (67.8±15.6 in males, 70.4±15.3 in females). In our study, prerenal factors were the most common etiologic factor with 57.2%; intrarenal factors were 32.1% of patients; postrenal factors were found to be 10.7%. Of the patients, 68 had complete healing (40.5%), 51 had no dialysis (30.4%), 31 had dialysis (18.5%) and 18 had exitus (10.6%). When geriatric patients (65 years and over) of age were evaluated, 16% cases died; mortality was significantly higher than under the age of 70 years (p=0.015).

Conclusion:

The data we obtained in the study support the knowledge that prerenal factors are the most common in AKI etiology, but it should not be overlooked that the etiology may be multifactorial. AKI is a health problem that increases with age and the presence of comorbid chronic diseases. AKI therapy may require a long stay in the hospital and is costly to treat.

Keywords: Acute renal damage, etiology of prerenal, AKIN