Abstract
In the course of the examination of about 250,000 ground squirrels for plague 6 cases were noted in which there were gross lesions in the kidneys and which on microscopic examination presented evidence of chronic nephritis.
In one of these the lesions were very much like those in the experimental uranium nephritis of rabbits. There were large areas of cellular infiltration and fibrosis with atrophy of the tubules. The capsules of the glomeruli in these areas were slightly thickened. Some of the glomeruli showed a marked cystic dilatation. Other parts of these kidneys were practically normal except for a partial necrosis of the epithelium.
Two other specimens resembled closely the type of spontaneous nephritis in wild rats described by us in the Journal of Medical Research (1912, XXVI, 249). There was the same granular degeneration, necrosis and desquamation of the epithelium in some places with marked regenerative proliferation of the epithelium in others. There was the same tendency to the formation of epithelial cysts. The glomeruli showed some enlargement and proliferation of the capsular epithelium and a slight fibrous thickening of the capsule itself. In the interstitial tissue we found irregular areas of cellular infiltration and more or less fibrosis.
The three remaining cases were the most interesting ones in that they showed an entirely different type of the disease associated with the accumulation in many, usually somewhat dilated, tubules of colorless crystalline masses which seem to consist of thick rhomboidal plates closely joined together in the form of rosettes. Sometimes they are so tightly packed as to form solid spherical bodies. One of us (Ophüls) has observed similar deposits in a human kidney in a case in which the renal pelvis was filled with large stones, apparently composed largely of urates.
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