Histopathological pattern of pediatric renal diseases: a study from a university hospital in western Saudi Arabia

To study the clinical indications and histopathological pattern of renal biopsies and renal resection specimens in the pediatric age group (birth to 17 years) in a large academic center in western Saudi Arabia. A retrospective review of the computerized database of the Pathology Department at King Abdul Aziz University Hospital (KAUH) was carried out on the final pathology reports of all children of the age of 17 years and below who either had ultrasound-guided renal biopsies or partial or total renal resections during the period between January 1995 and December 2008. All the specimens were reported by our pathology department. The most common clinical indication in the study group (242) is nephrotic syndrome (117, 48.3%), followed by systemic lupus erythromatosis for staging (30, 12.4%), nephritic syndrome (27, 11.1%) and renal mass for histological diagnosis (17, 7.0%). The most frequently reported pathological diagnosis was renal glomerulopathies, constituting 183 cases (n = 183, 75.6%) of the total number of pathology reports reviewed. Primary glomerulopathies were more common (n = 155, 88.4%) than the secondary ones (n = 28, 11.6%). The second most common pediatric renal pathology in this study was renal neoplasms (14, 5.7%). Vascular renal diseases and renal glomerulosclerosis ranked as the third pathological diagnosis in order of frequency in this study, with ten cases (10, 4.1%). The most common clinical indication for renal tissue sampling in this study is nephrotic syndrome and the most frequently detected pathology is glomerulonephritis. Larger multicentre studies are needed to further study pediatric nephropathies.