Our latest study suggests that we may be diagnosing a LOT of people with acute kidney injury who don't actually have it.
Acute kidney injury (AKI) is a major killer in the US. At least, that's what the data shows. But a lot depends onhow you diagnose AKI. Our latest study suggests that natural variation in lab measurement of creatinine is leading to strikingly high false-diagnosis rates, and that the association we see between AKI and bad outcomes like mortality may be an artifact of the fact that sicker people get more blood draws. Take a look at our full paper here.
And if you want to run the simulation for yourself (and you have stata), you can get our code and relevant files here.