Figure 1.
Kidney cortex triglyceride content and relationship with body mass index (BMI).
Nephrectomy cortex samples were obtained from 54 patients with serum creatinine <1.5 mg/dL and no proteinuria. All surgical specimens were dissected by experienced clinical pathologists and confirmed to be healthy, away from the tumor. RS, Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient.
Table 1.
Demographic and anthropometric characteristics.
Table 2.
Biochemical and clinical characteristics.
Figure 2.
Kidney cortex sections were stained with Oil Red O and standard hematoxylin to visualize lipid localization within renal structures. After image acquisition, a computer-based color deconvolution and thresholding algorithm was used to separately visualize and quantify Oil Red O staining, with the original image serving as reference for the manual assignment of lipid staining to discrete structures (i.e. tubule cells, glomeruli, interstitium, other). A. Oil Red O staining was noted predominantly in proximal tubule cells, and generally increased with increasing body mass index (BMI). B. Examples of the localization of lipids within tubule cells, glomeruli and interstitium. C. Relative distribution of lipids within kidney structures based on Oil Red O staining quantified by color deconvolution in 29 study participants with available fixed tissue. Whiskers represent 95% confidence intervals.
Figure 3.
Kidney cortex ceramide content and relationship with triglycerides.
Sixteen common ceramide species (Cer, ceramide; GlucCer, glucosylceramide; LacCer, lactosylceramide; DHCer, dihydroceramide) were measured by high performance liquid chromatography-electrospray ionization-tandem mass spectrometry (HPLC-ESI-MS/MS) in kidney cortex samples previously frozen at −80°C. A. The abundance of each ceramide species in human kidney cortex samples with increasing triglyceride content. B. Relationship between total ceramide content (molar sum of all measured ceramides) and triglyceride content in human kidney cortex samples. RS, Spearman rank-order correlation coefficient. C. Total ceramide content in kidney cortex samples from Zucker diabetic fatty (ZDF) and lean control rats.