id	author	title	date	pages	extension	mime	words	sentences	flesch	summary	cache	txt
cord-259724-pbxd67tt	Bamias, Giorgos	Balkan Nephropathy: Evolution of Our Knowledge	2008-08-23		.txt	text/plain	5456	313	52	Balkan endemic nephropathy (BEN), originally described in the late 1950s as a chronic tubulointerstitial kidney disease, is identified by its unique epidemiological features. The quest for the responsible environmental factor has been long and diverse, and although no definitive answer has been provided to date, converging lines of evidence support the theory that long-term consumption of food contaminated with aristolochic acid underlies the pathogenesis of BEN. Finally, if somebody were to solve the mystery of BEN, he or she should use information from both animal models of interstitial nephropathy and the recognized effects of the candidate environmental factors in human health and disease. Recently, work by Grollman et al 42, 54 expanded these results by showing that aristolochic acidspecific adducts were present in the renal cortex of 5 patients with BEN from an endemic region in Croatia, but not in 5 patients with other forms of chronic renal disease or 5 patients with upper urinary tract transitional cell cancer living in a nonendemic area of Croatia.	./cache/cord-259724-pbxd67tt.txt	./txt/cord-259724-pbxd67tt.txt