ABSTRACT
S.M. Thomas1, G.C. Viberti2. 1King’s Diabetes Centre, King’s College Hospital, London 2Department of Endocrinology, Diabetes & Internal Medicine, Division of Medicine, GKT School of Medicine, Guy’s Hospital Campus, KCL
INTRODUCTION
The term microalbuminuria was first coined in 1969 by Keen et al in Guy’s Hospital Reports [1]. They described raised urinary albumin excretion rate (AER) in patients with type 2 diabetes. The authors noted that the AER correlated with the systolic blood pressure and made the prescient speculation that “the results of hypertension and hyperglycaemia combine to increase the degree of albuminuria”. In 1974 Parving et al described that microalbuminuria was also present in non-diabetic populations with essential hypertension [2]. Over the last twenty years there has been increasing interest in the importance of microalbuminuria as a marker of not only renal disease but cardiovascular disease in populations both with and without diabetes.
