[Mechanisms of repair after renal injury]

Recovery from kidney injury through repair mechanisms often linked to inflammation is conditioned by nature and severity of the insult. In the assessment of kidney repair, functional recovery should be kept distinct from structural repair: compensatory hypertrophy/function of intact nephrons often masks the inability of the kidney to heal or replace damaged structures. The mechanisms of repair reflect three degrees of injury, differently handled by the kidney. First, repair of DNA damage is accomplished through proofreading DNA polymerases, along with other controls for sequence misalignment / nucleotide replacement. If DNA cannot be repaired, cells carrying mutation(s) are disposed of through apoptosis, which is also critical to clearing damaged kidney cells and infiltrating leukocytes in acute and chronic ischemic, immunological, or chemical damage. A second mechanism of repair is linked to proliferation of surviving cells. At least 5 types of reparative proliferation are known to occur, some of which implicate stem cell immigration from distant reservoirs, followed by in situ differentiation. A third mode of repair could be referred to as structural repair, indeed limited in the human kidney by the absence of postnatal nephrogenesis. Recovery from acute tubular necrosis involves remodelling of the proximal tubule, with a strict requirement for integrity of the basement membrane. Contrary to the current dogma that only acute injury can be repaired, whereas chronic damage leads to irreversible loss of nephrons, evidence is emerging that some degree of renal remodelling occurs even in chronic renal disease, despite the occurrence of stabilized structural changes.