Shaul G. Massry Division of Nephrology, The University of Southern California, School of Medicine Los Angeles, California In the last two decades evidence has accumulated indicating that parathyroid hormone may exert a multitude of effects on many cells and a variety of organs beyond its classical targets: the kidney and the bone. These efforts have been spearheaded by nephrologists. The interest of this group of clinicians-scientists stems from the fact that patients with renal failure have secondary hyperparathyroidism and markedly elevated blood levels of PTH (1,2). If this hormone does...

Volume 4 of Contemporary Nephrology summarizes major advances in 16 different areas of nephrology during the years 1985 and 1986. Major changes in the composition of the Editorial Board and authorship of the different chapters have occurred in this volume. Six distinguished contributors have retired from the Editorial Board. They include Dr. Zalman A. Agus, Philadelphia; Dr. Robert Anderson, Denver; Dr. Eli Friedman, Brooklyn; Dr. Richard Glassock, Torrance, California; Dr. James Schafer, Birmingham, Alabama; and Dr. Gordon Williams, Bos ton. We are grateful to them for their outstanding...

'Where are all these kidney patients coming from? A Atchley and others studied the effects of hypertension, endocarditis, and circulatory diseases on the kidney and few years ago we never heard of kidney disease and now you are speaking of patients in the hundreds of thou spawned successive generations of alert clinical investi sands and indeed potentially millions'. My reply, not gators who began to chronicle the natural histories of a meant to be grim, was 'From the cemetery, Sir'. This is wide variety of kidney diseases. Quantitative studies of a summary of some Congressional testimony I...

When Shaul Massry and Herbert Fleisch asked me to write a foreword for this book, I was honored and eagerly looked forward to reading the many chapters. As they came and I skimmed through them, my mind wandered back to the earliest classic contributions in this field in the late 1920s and early 1930s by Albright and his associates, Greenwald and Gross and Adolph, on the homeostatic regulation of inorganic phosphate and the central role of parathyroid hormone (PTH) in this regulation. They clearly showed the exquisite sensitivity of the renal handling of phosphate to varying dietary and...

We are pleased to present to our readers the Proceedings of the Fourth International Workshop on Phosphate and Other Minerals which was held in Strasbourg during June 22-24, 1979. It was hosted by Professor Henri Jahn, Professor of Medicine and Chief, Department of Nephrology at the University of Strasbourg. These Workshops have become a tradition in the scientific scene of mineral metabolism. The meetings have been providing a unique framework for close interaction between scientists from various disciplines, such as nephrologists, endocrinologists, bio- chemists, nutritionists, and those...