| 2. |
- Friedli, Iris, et al.
(författare)
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Magnetic Resonance Imaging in Clinical Trials of Diabetic Kidney Disease
- 2023
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Ingår i: Journal of Clinical Medicine. - 2077-0383. ; 12:14
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Forskningsöversikt (refereegranskat)abstract
- Chronic kidney disease (CKD) associated with diabetes mellitus (DM) (known as diabetic kidney disease, DKD) is a serious and growing healthcare problem worldwide. In DM patients, DKD is generally diagnosed based on the presence of albuminuria and a reduced glomerular filtration rate. Diagnosis rarely includes an invasive kidney biopsy, although DKD has some characteristic histological features, and kidney fibrosis and nephron loss cause disease progression that eventually ends in kidney failure. Alternative sensitive and reliable non-invasive biomarkers are needed for DKD (and CKD in general) to improve timely diagnosis and aid disease monitoring without the need for a kidney biopsy. Such biomarkers may also serve as endpoints in clinical trials of new treatments. Non-invasive magnetic resonance imaging (MRI), particularly multiparametric MRI, may achieve these goals. In this article, we review emerging data on MRI techniques and their scientific, clinical, and economic value in DKD/CKD for diagnosis, assessment of disease pathogenesis and progression, and as potential biomarkers for clinical trial use that may also increase our understanding of the efficacy and mode(s) of action of potential DKD therapeutic interventions. We also consider how multi-site MRI studies are conducted and the challenges that should be addressed to increase wider application of MRI in DKD.
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| 3. |
- Gonda, Noemi, et al.
(författare)
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Critical Reflexivity in Political Ecology Research: How can the Covid-19 Pandemic Transform us Into Better Researchers?
- 2021
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Ingår i: Frontiers in Human Dynamics. - : Frontiers Media SA. - 2673-2726. ; 3
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Tidskriftsartikel (refereegranskat)abstract
- It is not just the world but our ways of producing knowledge that are in crisis. The Covid-19 pandemic has exposed our interconnected vulnerabilities in ways never seen before while underscoring the need for emancipation in particular from the hegemonic knowledge politics that underpin “business-as-usual” academic research that have both contributed to and failed to address the systemic challenges laid bare by the pandemic. Political ecologists tasked with knowledge generation on vulnerabilities and their underlying power processes are particularly well placed to envision such emancipatory processes. While pausing physically due to travel restrictions, as researchers in political ecology and rural development at the same university department, we want to make a stop to radically rethink our intellectual engagements. In this article, we aim to uncover “sanitized” aspects of research encounters, and theorize on the basis of anecdotes, feelings and informal discussions—“data” that is often left behind in fieldwork notes and personal diaries of researchers—, the ways in which our own research practices hamper or can be conducive to emancipation in times of multiple interconnected health, political, social, and environmental crises. We do so through affective autoethnography and resonances on our research encounters during the pandemic: with people living in Swedish Sapmi, with African students in our own “Global North” university department and with research partners in Nepal. We use a threefold focus on interconnectedness, uncertainty and challenging hegemonic knowledge politics as our analytical framework. We argue that acknowledging the roles of emotions and affect can 1) help embrace interconnectedness in research encounters; 2) enable us to work with uncertainty rather than “hard facts” in knowledge production processes; and 3) contribute to challenging hegemonic knowledge production. Opening up for emotions in research helps us to embrace the relational character of vulnerability as a pathway to democratizing power relations and to move away from its oppressive and colonial modes still present in universities and research centers. Our aim is to contribute to envisioning post-Covid-19 political ecology and rural development research that is critically reflexive and that contributes to the emergence of a new ethics of producing knowledge.Historically, pandemics have forced humans to break with the past and imagine their world anew. This one is no different. It is a portal, a gateway between one world and the next. We can choose to walk through it, dragging the carcasses of our prejudice and hatred, our avarice, our data banks and dead ideas, our dead rivers and smoky skies behind us. Or we can walk through lightly, with little luggage, ready to imagine another world. And ready to fight for it. (Roy, 2020)
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