Is Nephritis (Glomerulonephritis) Hereditary

Many Nephritis(Glomerulonephritis) patients worry that the disease will affect their children and whether Nephritis is a hereditary disease. Now we will give a brief introduction about this topic.
Nephritis is a group of chronic diseases with various causes and different pathological types. In Nephritis, both kidneys will present diffuse or focal inflammatory changes and the disease has hidden clinical onset, lengthy course and slow development.
For Nephritis patients, protein and occult blood always occur in urine, because renal filtration function is damaged, protein and occult blood can not leak out through filtration membrane, which make the kidney stay in a high filtration state. If this state lasts for a long period of time, mesangial proliferation will continue which can lead to further damage and renal ischemia and anoxia. At this time, patients should take timely and effective measures to ease the disease, or the pathological impairment will aggravate and cause renal fibrosis, damaged nephrons and progressively declined renal functions.
That whether Nephritis is hereditary or not depends on which kind it belongs to.Some kinds of Nephritis have heritability, especially hereditary Nephritis which can pass from parents to children and belongs to autosomal dominant hereditary disease. The causes of hereditary Nephritis remain unknown up to now, and generally it is believed that the disease is caused by the hereditary defect of basilar membrane. The hereditary Nephritis is characterized by familial heredity, and among the family members of several generations, many people may show hematuria which is the most common manifestation of hereditary Nephritis and occurs more commonly in young men than in women.

Experts point out that patients should pay much attention to daily diet and health care. For those patients who have no obvious edema and high blood pressure, there is no need to limit the intake of water and sodium salt. For those patients with slight and moderate azotemia, especially for those who lose massive protein every day, they shouldn’t control the intake of protein in order to maintain positive nitrogen balance. For those patients with massive proteinuria and mild azotemia, they should supplement more vegetable protein. And in serious cases, patients should limit the intake of protein.

Expert Online