Nisha Bansal
University of Washington, WA·Medicine & Clinical Research
The kidneys and the heart are closely linked, and patients with failing kidneys or failing hearts often suffer serious complications. Doctors still lack good ways to measure and manage key risks in these patients.
- Fields
Medicine & Clinical Research
Public Health & Epidemiology
- Topics
hemodialysis
end-stage kidney disease
home blood pressure monitoring
- Grants
- 2 known grants, through Apr 2027
What they work on
- Test whether targeting home systolic blood pressure, rather than pre-dialysis blood pressure, below 140 mmHg reduces dangerous blood pressure drops during dialysis, in a 200-patient two-center crossover randomized trial of hemodialysis patients.
- Track how treating pre-dialysis versus home blood pressure changes the other measurement over 12 months, to show whether home blood pressure can be predicted from dialysis-unit readings.
- Identify physician-level barriers to home blood pressure treatment and measure long-term patient adherence when readings are sent automatically by technology.
- Determine whether serial measurements of new kidney injury markers, covering blood vessel injury, inflammation and kidney tubule stress, change during a standardized treatment protocol for acute decompensated heart failure.
- Test whether changes in these kidney injury markers, compared with serum creatinine, predict patient-reported, in-hospital and long-term outcomes in a large prospective cohort of heart failure patients.
More about the research
Two clinical studies tackle this gap. One asks whether blood pressure should be measured and treated at home rather than at the dialysis unit for people on hemodialysis, a treatment that filters the blood when the kidneys have failed. The other asks whether new blood markers of kidney injury can guide care for patients hospitalized with heart failure better than the standard kidney test.
Why it matters
Hemodialysis patients and people hospitalized with acute heart failure face high rates of heart events and death. HOME-BP could support a shift toward measuring and treating home blood pressure in dialysis care. It may reduce dangerous blood pressure drops during dialysis and could lay the groundwork for larger trials. The heart failure study could identify kidney injury markers that help doctors guide treatment and judge prognosis better than serum creatinine.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Todd Miano
University of Pennsylvania, PA·Medicine & Clinical Research
Test whether kidney injury linked to vancomycin plus piperacillin-tazobactam is a pseudotoxicity, meaning creatinine rises without real tissue damage, in a randomized trial against vancomycin plus cefepime in acutely ill patients with infection.
Vikram Fielding-Singh
Stanford University, CA·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Evaluate how modifiable preoperative hemodialysis parameters relate to postoperative complications such as myocardial infarction, stroke, heart failure, arrhythmia and infection, using linked Medicare claims and dialysis-provider electronic health records.
Denise Hasson
New York University, NY·Medicine & Clinical Research·Early-career
Characterize baseline nutritional status in 200 high-risk pediatric ICU patients using dietary questionnaires, malnutrition screening, arm circumference, skinfold thickness, grip strength and muscle ultrasound, and test whether these risk subtypes predict acute kidney injury.
The school
University of Washington: 81 labs on PI Pages, $1.7B a year on research, 694 research doctorates a year.
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