A User’s Guide to Kidney Health, with Dr. Kristin Meliambro

This National Kidney Month, we celebrate the unsung heroes of the human body. Kidneys do so much more than filter blood (they’ve been described as the body’s “cleaning crew” and “inventory managers”), so keeping them functioning well is vital to our overall health. Joining us to sing the praises of kidneys – and learn how to keep them healthy – is Dr. Kristin Meliambro, an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. Dr. Meliambro walks us through the many essential jobs kidneys do for us and breaks down the various causes of kidney disease. She also shares practical lifestyle habits that support long-term kidney health.

The Takeaway

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• For additional information and support, visit the National Kidney Foundation website, at Kidney.org, and the American Association of Kidney Patients, at www.aakp.org.
• For information about kidney donation, visit the Nation Kidney Registry page at KidneyRegistry.com
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Guest Bio
Kristin Meliambro, MD, is an Associate Professor in the Department of Medicine, Division of Nephrology at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. She earned her medical degree from the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai, and she completed both her internal medicine residency and clinical and research nephrology fellowships at the Mount Sinai Hospital. In addition to treating patients with a wide range of kidney diseases in diverse clinical settings, Dr. Meliambro is an NIH-funded physician-investigator who conducts basic and translational research with a focus on mechanisms of kidney podocyte injury and novel disease therapies. She is the co-Director of the Nephrology Division’s Renal Biorepository, which banks biological specimens and collects clinical data from patients starting at the time of kidney biopsy and continuing longitudinally. She also actively participates as a PI and Co-Investigator in clinical trials testing novel agents for glomerular diseases. Dr. Meliambro also has a strong record of research mentorship of Associate Researchers and graduate/medical students in her lab, the majority of whom have been women and from under-represented minorities in science and medicine.

Dr. Meliambro sees patients with a variety of kidney diseases, and she has a particular clinical interest in glomerular diseases. Her clinical responsibilities include the care of outpatients at the Mount Sinai Doctors nephrology practice, hemodialysis patients at Central Park Dialysis Center and inpatients at the Mount Sinai Hospital, where she also teaches and supervises nephrology fellows on the inpatient nephrology services.