Every year, in celebration of Martin Luther King, Jr.’s legacy, UW Health Services and UW Medicine honor members of the university community who have dedicated themselves to serving those in need.
Naomi Nkinsi grew up in Yaoundé, Cameroon, speaking French, wearing brightly colored clothes, and her name was pronounced “Now-me.”
Her parents were from the Democratic Republic of Congo and she grew up with a rich history of African culture. But when she moved to a suburb of Atlanta when she was 6, she changed her name to “Nay-o-me” and ditched the brightly colored clothes for jeans and T-shirts. She struggled to fit in.
For years, physicians and medical students, many of them Black, have warned that the most widely used kidney test — the results of which are based on race — is racist and dangerously inaccurate. Their appeals are gaining new traction, with a wave of petitions and papers calling renewed attention to the issue.
UW medical students initiate one of the first of its kind transition to the calculation of estimated glomerular filtration rate that is not adjusted by race.
A serum creatinine test measures the level of creatinine in your blood and provides an estimate of how well your kidneys filter (glomerular filtration rate).