Background: Blood urea nitrogen and serum creatinine concentrations only detect a decrease of 475% of renal functional mass. Therefore, there is a need for markers that allow early detection and localization of renal damage.Hypothesis: Urinary albumin (uALB), C-reactive protein (uCRP), retinol binding protein (uRBP), and N-acetyl-b-Dglucosaminidase (uNAG) concentrations are increased in dogs with chronic kidney disease (CKD) compared with healthy controls and in healthy older dogs compared with young dogs.Animals: Ten dogs with CKD, 10 healthy young dogs (age 1-3 years), and 10 healthy older dogs (age 4 7 years) without clinically relevant abnormalities on physical examination, hematology, biochemistry, and urinalysis.Methods: Urinary markers were determined using an ELISA (uALB, uCRP, and uRBP) or a colorimetric test (uNAG). Results were related to urinary creatinine (c). The fixed effects model or the Wilcoxon rank sum test were used to compare the different groups of dogs.Results: uALB/c, uRBP/c, and uNAG/c were significantly higher in CKD dogs than in healthy dogs. No significant difference was found for uCRP, which was not detectable in the healthy dogs and only in 3 of the CKD dogs. Between the healthy young and older dogs, no significant difference was detected for any of the markers.Conclusion: The urinary markers uALB/c, uRBP/c, and uNAG/c were significantly increased in dogs with CKD compared with healthy controls. Additional studies are needed to evaluate the ability of these markers to detect renal disease before the onset of azotemia.

Routinely, kidney dysfunction and decreased glomerular filtration rate (GFR) are diagnosed by the evaluation of changes in the serum creatinine (SCr) and blood urea nitrogen (BUN) concentrations. However, neither of these tests is sensitive or specific enough for the early diagnosis of impaired kidney function because they are both affected by other renal and nonrenal factors. Furthermore, kidney injury can be present in the absence of kidney dysfunction. Renal reserve enables normal GFR even when nephrons are damaged. Renal biomarkers, especially those present in urine, may be useful for the study of both acute and chronic nephropathies. The aim of this review is to describe the current status of urinary biomarkers as diagnostic tools for kidney injury in dogs with particular focus on acute kidney injury (AKI). The International Renal Interest Society (IRIS) canine AKI grading system and the implementation of urinary biomarkers in this system also are discussed. The discovery of novel urinary biomarkers has emerged from hypotheses about the pathophysiology of kidney injury, but few proteomic urine screening approaches have been described in dogs. Lack of standardization of biomarker assays further complicates the comparison of novel canine urinary biomarker validation results among studies. Future research should focus on novel biomarkers of renal origin and evaluate promising biomarkers in different clinical conditions. Validation of selected urinary biomarkers in the diagnosis of canine kidney diseases must include dogs with both renal and nonrenal diseases to evaluate their sensitivity, specificity as well as their negative and positive predictive values.

An analysis of the 1995 Belgian General Election Survey indicates that the bipolar national identity variable, which contrasts citizens who identify exclusively with the Belgian nation with those who identify exclusively with the Flemish or Walloon subnation, measures not only the direction but also the intensity of national feelings. Respondents who are located at the middle of the scale tend to have a weak identification with both the nation and the subnation. On the basis of a structural equations modeling approach involving a test of the construct equivalence in the two regions and a control for agreeing-response bias, it is shown that the bipolar national identity variable and attitude toward foreigners are inversely related in Flanders and Wallonia. In Flanders, citizens with a strong subnational identification tend to have a negative attitude toward foreigners; those with a strong Belgian identification are more positive. This relationship became more pronounced after controlling for the respondents' level of education. In Wallonia, a reverse but less pronounced relationship was found. These findings support the hypothesis that the relationship between the variables of national identity and attitude toward foreigners is not intrinsic, but is at least partly determined by the social representation of the nation.KEY WORDS: national identity, ethnocentrism, social identification, social representations In states where citizens are faced with two competing nationalities, national identity is often operationalized as a bipolar variable: The citizens who exclusively identify with either the national (e.g., Spanish) or the subnational (e.g., Catalonian) entity are located at the extremes, whereas those who identify with

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Dogs with pyometra and UPC>1.0 or high ratios of urinary biomarkers appear likely to have clinically relevant renal histologic lesions and require monitoring after ovariohysterectomy. Future studies should evaluate the role of pyometra-associated pathogenic mechanisms in causing or exacerbating focal and segmental glomerulosclerosis in dogs.

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