ABSTRACT
Satishkumar A Jayawardene and Neil S Sheerin Department of Nephrology and Transplantation, Guy’s Hospital, King’s College London, UK
The introduction of renal biopsy in the early 1950s [1] and its increasing use in the late 1960s and 1970s has had a major impact on our understanding and management of renal disease. Its use has become widespread and is now a routine investigation in most renal units. Nevertheless, it is an invasive intervention that has a small but definite risk of morbidity and mortality. Therefore it is not an investigation performed on all diabetic patients with suspected renal disease. There is considerable, often heated, debate as to what criteria we should use to decide which diabetic patients should have a renal biopsy.
