Summary of clinical practice guidelines for acute kidney injury

Clinical practice guidelines are intended to standardize the diagnosis and treatment of diseases in order to improve both patient outcomes and resource utilization, using evidence-based criteria. As recently as a decade ago, there was no agreed upon definition of acute kidney injury (AKI), making it difficult to conduct proper clinical studies on the epidemiology and treatment of the disorder. Following the advent of the Risk, Injury, Failure, Loss, and End-stage (RIFLE) criteria for defining AKI, several guidelines for the diagnosis and management of AKI have been developed. In our review, we present a narrative description and comparison of the major published guidelines. Overall, there has been significant agreement among the various guidelines, and each seems well-reasoned and clinically useful. Perhaps the most striking conclusion upon review of the various guidelines is the limited scope of knowledge about optimal management of patients with AKI.