Are We Overly Concerned About Kidney Injury From Contrast-Enhanced Computed Tomography?

The idea that intravenous contrast material is an important cause of acute kidney injury (AKI) is based largely on uncontrolled observations. A retrospective study challenges this conventional wisdom.

Mayo Clinic researchers identified all patients who had either contrast-enhanced or unenhanced chest, abdominal, or pelvic computed tomography (CT) scans during a 10-year period and for whom pre- and post-scan data on renal function were available. Propensity score matching was used to create 2 groups of 6000 patients each. One group had undergone contrast-enhanced CT, and the other had undergone unenhanced CT, but the groups were virtually identical in their distributions of baseline renal function and demographic and clinical variables that c…