• Estimation of renal function and prevalence of renal disease in children

Kidney problems occur in children as in adults.  Many children are recognized as being at risk before or shortly after birth, but some will not be identified, or will develop kidney disease later in life.

I am interested in developing tools that can: a) accurately predict a child's true renal function without use of specialized hospital based testing, and b) be used to develop an estimate of the number of children in BC who either have, or are at high risk of developing renal disease at some point in the future.

In conjunction with one of my laboratory colleagues, we are now in the planning stages of extending our prior published work on predicting renal function in children with renal disease to a 'normal' population of children, and eventually looking at screening a large number of children in BC to develop the estimates as above.

Currently, a laboratory colleague and I are in the process of analyzing and then publishing data from our earlier work on predicting renal function geared specifically to children post renal transplant - this work will assist us in following renal transplant function more accurately during and between clinic visits.

Our next project will entail the use of large laboratory databases in BC, from which we hope to extract a rough estimation of the prevalence of renal disease in unselected children of the province, i.e. not already recognized as being at risk of renal disease.  This work is assisted in part by the standardization of creatinine measurements in BC; and will be made more valuable by the fact that here at BC Children's Hospital (in part due to our work on GFR), we now perform internationally standardized measurement of creatinine, allowing our results to be used throughout the world.

Finally, I have recently joined a group from University of North Carolina's Pediatric Nephrology Division who share interests in estimating renal disease prevalence in children.  We will be looking at a dataset which comes from a large cross sectional national study of children in the US population, NHANES III, in an attempt to predict the prevalence of kidney disease in an otherwise 'healthy' population of US adolescents.

National Kidney Foundation - Dialysis Outcomes and Quality Initiatives, Clinical Practice Guidlelines and Clinical Practice Recommendations for Anemia in Chronic Kidney Diseases.  Member of work group.  American Journal of Kidney Diseases, Vol 47 No 5 May (Supplement 3), S1-145, 2006.

Dionne JM, Wu J, Heran M, Murphy JJ, Jevon G, White CT. Grand rounds Clinicopathologic Conference: Malignant Hypertension, Polycythemia, and Paragangliomas. J Pediatr, 2006 April; 148(4):540-545.

Mattman A, Eintracht S, Mock T, Schick G, Seccombe OW, Hurley AM, White CT.  Estimating Pediatric Glomerular Filtration Rates in the Era of CKD Staging. Journal of the American Society of Nephrology 2006; 17:487-496.

Strong OK, Lai A, Primett D, White CT, Lirenman DS, Carter JE, Hurley AM, Virji M, Ensom MHH. Limited sampling strategy for Cyclosporine (Neoral) Area Under the Curve Monitoring in Paediatric Kidney Transplant Recipients. Pediatr Transplantation 2005; 9:566-573.

Lai A, Lirenman DS, Carter J, White CT, Strong OK, Ensom MHH.  Establishing a Limited Sample Strategy for Cycolsporine (Neoral) for Pediatric Renal Transplant Patients. J Informed Pharmacother 2004;15:400.

White CT, Macpherson CF, Hurley RM, Matsell DG. Antiproteinuric effects of enalapril and iosartant: a pilot study. Pediatr Nephrol. 2003 Oct; 18(10);1038-43.

Coulter-Mackie MS, White CT, Hurley RM. (Posted [19 June 2002]). Primary Hyperoxaluria Type I. In: GeneReviews at GeneTests GeneClinics: Medical Genetics Information Resource (database online). Copyright, University of Washington, Seattle.  1997-2002. Available at http://www.geneclinics.org or http://www.genetests.org. Accessed [29 August 2002].