In March each year the nephrology community, supported by the American Journal of Kidney Disease, engages in an educational initiative called nephmadness.
It is a serious yet relaxed event. It involves a lot of cake eating, if you get the picture.
it takes the form of a “ Mad March” college basket ball tournament. Kidney topics are picked as teams and compete against each other to chose an annual Champion.
in 2023 TMA has been chosen as a topic and two teams have been formed . Primary TMA and Secondary TMA.
Each of the other seven topics are also split into two teams. Sixteen teams enter the first round.
Information about the teams is produced using sports analogies but underpinning it all is important stuff about each of the conditions which is for continual professional education (CPE) purposes.
A Primary TMA team image turns the Complement System into a sequence of basket ball moves culminating in the team self scoring rather than in the opponent’s basket. Sound familiar.
Kidney clinician experts and students hold informal events ( hence the cakes) to discuss each of the teams presentations and judge in a not too serious way which teams to bracket ( choose) to move forward to the next round.
In the first round Primary TMA plays Secondary TMA and all participants in the NephMadness event choose ( predict) the likely favoured teams. The winning teams from the TMA Region will then move on to “compete” with the predicted winning team from the IgAN Region Teams and the predicted winner of that moves on to the semi finals and final.
Participants build up points from correct predictions made by a panel of nine experts who have judged which team will “cause the most practice change in nephrology over the next five years as it’s Champion. The players with highest correct prediction score wins the prize free subscriptons to a couple of kidney journals , but all can get 8 CPE points for participating in this educational event . The Primary TMA team ( Global Action is obviously rooting for its team member aHUS) is a minnow against the big players in this competition. Size may matter in a democratic race when it comes to matters of “mostness”.
The next 5 years of TMA care practice is going see expanding Complement understanding , a deluge of treatment opportunities , substantial disease name changing and significant diagnosis process practice changes . A veritable revolution in clinical practice albeit for small number of ultra rare disease patients. If that is surpassed by other kidney “regions” in the tournament, kidney patients are going to see a major paradigm shift in their care.
One of the TMA team captains is Anuja Java of Washington University St Louis who is well known to Global Action . Her team’s information about TMAs can be read HERE. Read it and you will never see aHUS and TMAs the same way again.
Inevitably these days there is a social media angle to the event. For learning, of course, but mainly for awareness and fun ( including plenty of delicious looking cake photographs see below ). @nephmadness #nephmadness and Global Action has joined in with the sporting analogies. Though the author is more familiar with soccer ( or football as he prefers to call it ) than basketball.
“Que sera sera” chant the Primary TMA supporters led by aHUS Global Action.
Global Action’s picks are in the table below and in our unbiased judgement Primary TMA will be the become the Champions of Nephmadness 2023 overcoming non steroidal MRA in the final. Not going to happen!
Results will be announced after the 31 March deadline for bracket submissions. Extended to 3pm EDT 2 April.
3 April Round 1 results – the “Effluent 8” named
Effluent 8 : Organ Pool, Devices in AKI , Secondary TMA , Non IS in IgAN , Non steroidal MRA, AKI in ICIs, Supportive Care for Kidney Failure, Transgender Kidney Care. PRIMARY TMA is eliminated 3-6 by panel. Participants voted 54-46 in favour .
5 April Effluent 8 results – the “Filtered 4 “ named
Fluent 4 Organ pool v Secondary TMA , AKI in ICI s v Supportive Care for Kidney Failure
7 April Filtered 4 results – the Finalist named
10 April the Champions Crowned
Now did I mention there are cakes , the complement themed cookies look appealing.
Article No, 573
