Dear Colleagues!

Sometimes when I close my eyes, I feel capable of time travel. And why not? Imagination gives us such an opportunity! Let's take a mental and invisible leap back two hundred years: London, paving stones, mansions, carriages, horse "aromas", a small number of citizens of various incomes by today's standards. The gate in the handsome fence of Guy's Hospital ajar. It was considered to be far from the center (I looked it up: according to the navigator - 9 minutes by car to Big Ben). Every day for 30 years, Richard Bright came here. Oh, there he is: medium height, cylinder over a high forehead, thick sideburns....

This man performed a real scientific feat. In those days, it wasn't fully understood exactly how the kidneys worked. But he was able to put together a certain important puzzle: clinical manifestations of apoplexy (redness of the face, pain in the back of the head, heaviness in the chest, nosebleeds) and edema, laboratory picture of proteinuria (urine when heated turbid, appeared flakes of protein, and when carefully layered on concentrated acid in a test tube, it gave a gray disk at the boundary of the two liquids) and morphological signs of kidney damage. Having distinguished three main forms of kidney disease, corresponding to the modern concepts of nephrosis, nephritis and nephrocirrhosis, Bright is rightly considered the father of world nephrology.

Today, the concept of CKD is different and generally accepted. Having accepted it in its time on a hurrah, today, to put it bluntly, cooled down and formed a different opinion on this subject from many colleagues. But this does not cancel the necessity for every doctor to know modern views on kidney diseases. Therefore, we have devoted this issue to various aspects of this dramatic and incredibly interesting facet of clinical medicine.

Enjoy your reading!

And happy new year!

Prof. I.V. Egorov