Clinical studies demonstrate that acute renal failure (ARF) is associated with increased
mortality, which may be due to pulmonary complications. ARF may affect the lung via
increased renal production or impaired clearance of mediators of lung injury, such as
proinflammatory cytokines. Bilateral nephrectomy is a method to examine directly the
deleterious systemic effects of absent renal clearance in ARF without the confounding
effects that are associated with ischemia-reperfusion injury (eg, ischemic ARF) or systemic …