“The urinary secretion of uromodulin is associated with protection against many common diseases,” says lead author of the study Azuma Nanamatsu.
‘New pathway for treating urinary tract infections and kidney stones better.’
Researchers explored this process in mice to test the effects of vasopressin induced increased cAMP on uromodulin secretion in a kidney cell line.
“This secretion only happened on the apical cell surface, which normally faces the lumen or external space in the kidney”, explains Takayasu Mori, senior author.
The authors also discovered that this secretion of uromodulin can be decreased by treating cells with a protein kinase A inhibitor. All these findings published in journal Hypertension suggest that vasopressin/cAMP/protein kinase A signaling is important for the secretion of uromodulin from kidney cells into the urine.
This new discovery related to the role of urinary uromodulin levels in kidney disease and hypertension can be used to develop better therapies for urinary tract infections and kidney stones.
Source: Medindia
