Glomerulonephritis: approaches to classification

Glomerulonephritis has many mechanisms and may take a variety of patterns. Almost as many classifications of glomerulonephritis exist as there have been classifiers. None is perfect. Morphological classification of glomerulonephritis is inadequate alone but provides useful information about the pattern of response to the injurious mechanism and may allow accurate assessment of prognosis. In this paper some approaches to the classification of glomerulonephritis are discussed, the major categories are reviewed and a prognostic method of classification is proposed.