Cardiorenal failure: pathophysiology, recognition and treatment.

This lyrical description of cardiorenal failure predates echocardiography and renal ultrasound by many hundreds of years but, despite these and other advances in diagnosis and treatment, cardiorenal failure remains an underresearched area of nephrology and cardiology. In this review, cardiorenal failure is defined as pulmonary congestion with a serum creatinine of 150 μmol/l or above. This is a somewhat arbitrary definition, but a useful way of distinguishing the ‘wet’ renal patient from the ‘dry’. Five categories of cardiorenal failure may be recognised (Table 1).