Analysis of 490 kidney biopsies: data from the United Arab Emirates Renal Diseases Registry

There is little data on the spectrum of renal diseases in the United Arab Emirates. A renal diseases registry has been set up in an attempt to address this issue nationwide, and we report here the first outcome of this endeavor, a retrospective histopathologic analysis of 490 native kidney biopsies performed on adult patients presenting to four hospitals in the Emirate of Abu Dhabi from 1978 to June 1996. The most common indication for a biopsy was the nephrotic syndrome (54.0%), followed by asymptomatic urinary abnormalities (29.7%), and chronic renal failure (12.7%). Primary glomerular disease accounted for 77.1% of all biopsies. Chronic proliferative glomerulonephritis as a group was the predominant pathology (36.2%), followed by idiopathic membranous glomerulopathy (20.1%), focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (18.3%), minimal change nephropathy (18.3%), and IgA nephropathy (6.3%). Of the patients with secondary kidney diseases, 33 (40.7%) had systemic lupus erythematosis, 27 (33.3%) amyloidosis, 14 interstitial nephropathy, and seven diabetic nephropathy. Kidney biopsies of 187 patients with primary glomerular disease who presented with the nephrotic syndrome were analyzed. In this group idiopathic membranous glomerulopathy, proliferative glomerulonephritis, and minimal change glomerulopathy was found in almost equal proportions (28.3%, 26.6%, 26.2%) with focal segmental glomerulosclerosis (15.4%) accounting for the bulk of the remainder. Though the overall results of this analysis do not show any major differences in the spectrum of primary glomerulopathies in the United Arab Emirates compared with other countries, a slight tendency towards a higher frequency of focal segmental glomerulosclerosis among patients indigenous to the Arabian Peninsular (20.4%) deserves further evaluation.