Long‐term renal injury in ANCA‐associated vasculitis: an analysis of 31 patients with follow‐up biopsies

Abstract

This is the first study to quantify glomerular changes between two time points in patients with renal vasculitis. Our results suggest that, on average, no new glomeruli are recruited into the active disease process. The sum of the percentage of crescentic and sclerotic glomeruli in the initial biopsies is larger than the percentage of sclerotic glomeruli in the follow-up biopsies. Thus, therapy seems not only to prevent normal glomeruli from being recruited into the active disease process for a certain time, but seems also to allow part of the active lesions to revert into a normal phenotype, although another part of the active lesions will be transformed to a chronic phenotype.