On 2015 Oct 16, NephJC - Nephrology Journal Club commented:

This study was discussed on Aug 25th and 26th in the open online nephrology journal club, #NephJC, on twitter. Introductory comments from Joel Topf and Suzanne Norby are available at the NephJC website and blog. The discussion was quite detailed, with more than 40 participants, including nephrologists, hematologists, fellows and residents. The highlights of the tweetchat were:

• Dr Agarwal and his team, as well as the funding agency (NIDDK and the Indiana Institute for Medical Research) should be congratulated for designing and conducting this trial, though most participants were somewhat perplexed by the choice of outcome for this intervention.

• There was a very intriguing signal in worse outcomes with intravenous iron (compared to oral iron) which, despite some uncertainty due to small sample size and early stoppage of the trial, is coherent with other non-renal data, as also some data from the dialysis literature, resulting in broad agreement that oral iron could be used more often, if needed.

• Some bold questions were discussed: Is there any reason to treat anemia in chronic kidney disease unless hemoglobin was < 9 g/dL? Is there a role for regular monitoring of hemoglobin at all, given lack of data that iron or erythropoietin result in improvement of any meaningful outcome?

A transcript and a curated (i.e. Storified) version of the tweetchat are available from the NephJC website.

Interested individuals can track and join in the conversation by following @NephJC or #NephJC, or visit the webpage at NephJC.com.

On 2015 Oct 16, NephJC - Nephrology Journal Club commented:

This study was discussed on Aug 25th and 26th in the open online nephrology journal club, #NephJC, on twitter. Introductory comments from Joel Topf and Suzanne Norby are available at the NephJC website and blog. The discussion was quite detailed, with more than 40 participants, including nephrologists, hematologists, fellows and residents. The highlights of the tweetchat were:

• Dr Agarwal and his team, as well as the funding agency (NIDDK and the Indiana Institute for Medical Research) should be congratulated for designing and conducting this trial, though most participants were somewhat perplexed by the choice of outcome for this intervention.

• There was a very intriguing signal in worse outcomes with intravenous iron (compared to oral iron) which, despite some uncertainty due to small sample size and early stoppage of the trial, is coherent with other non-renal data, as also some data from the dialysis literature, resulting in broad agreement that oral iron could be used more often, if needed.

• Some bold questions were discussed: Is there any reason to treat anemia in chronic kidney disease unless hemoglobin was < 9 g/dL? Is there a role for regular monitoring of hemoglobin at all, given lack of data that iron or erythropoietin result in improvement of any meaningful outcome?

A transcript and a curated (i.e. Storified) version of the tweetchat are available from the NephJC website.

Interested individuals can track and join in the conversation by following @NephJC or #NephJC, or visit the webpage at NephJC.com.