26-6-2012 - Right now Scott is in Utah

My mood while writing this blog: Right now Scott is in Utah

"It's serving as a call to action for us to work on testing strategies to prevent this from occurring and when it does occur, preventing people from having bad outcomes," he said.

Potential treatments being tested could include drugs and surgery, as well as changes to health services.

It's reasonable to assume that older, sicker patients may be higher risk of acute kidney injury, the researchers noted.

In particular, people who already had weak kidneys before the surgery were at highest risk, said Garg, who is also a professor of medicine and epidemiology at Western University, a scientist at ICES and a nephrologist at Lawson Health Research Institute.

Those with high blood pressure or diabetes were also at greater risk of suffering the kidney complication.

To conduct the study, Garg's team used three linked databases on hospital admissions and discharges, which included information on diagnoses and procedures performed as well a physician billing database and vital statistics.

"Worldwide, that means each year there's about a million people who require acute dialysis after major surgery," Garg said.

The researchers weren't able to tell if the thresholds for starting dialysis changed over the course of the study and the team did not have access to the patients' lab test results.

If someone had more than one admission to hospital during the study period then only the first one was analyzed to avoid selecting surgeries besides the first, elective one.