Metodología para el estudio de la disolución de cálculos renales usando microscopía de fuerza atómica (AFM)

Abstract

Formation and dissolution of kidney stones is an important medical subject, not completely understood jet. Surgery and lithotripsy techniques, nowadays solutions are still expensive and aggressive with important limitations. The aim of this study is to develop a new methodology to evaluate efficiency of different drugs treatment upon renal stone dissolution process, at nanometric scale. The main idea is to visualize (monitoring) the dissolution processes of the renal stones surface during the different substance treatment, including some commercial medical drugs. AFM as nanotechnology technique was used to monitor dissolution at the nanometric level. Here, in this work, we show how to prepare samples for the AFM study and how to record changes in the surface topography during the stone dissolution. The preliminary results, images obtained by using commercial drug Allopurinol, show significant surface layer alternation (the renal stone destruction), which was characterized in the qualitative and quantitative way, in great details. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2007.