Normal renal dimensions in a specific population.

INTRODUCTION Renal dimensions (RD) are important for the diagnostic and the prognostic of nephropathies. MATERIALS AND METHODS We selected 904 Brazilians subjects with normal excretory urographies, showing dense nephrogram at the 5th minute of the exam, serum creatinine < 1.3mg/dl, and absence of any disease that could modify RD. Length, width, and area of both kidneys were correlated with gender, age, height, and body weight. Five hundred and eighty one subjects were men (64.3%) and 323 were women (35.7%). Age ranged from 21 to 87 years old, body weight from 40 to 106kg (69.9+/-9.5 for men and 62.4+/-9.7 for women), and height from 1.37 to 1.94m (1.68+/-0.07 for men and 1.57+/-0.07 for women). RESULTS There was an association (one-way Anova test) between length, width, and area, for each kidney and for both, with height (p<0.001), body weight (p<0.001), and gender (p<0.001). After adjustment for height (covariance analysis), both gender and body weight did not show influence on RD. Renal length and area reduced with aging (p<0.001), from the 7th decade compared to the others. Excluding these patients, height was the only variable to show association with RD, justifying data stratification by this variable. CONCLUSIONS Renal length in this population showed that the normal patterns defined by other studies are inadequate for our population. Adjusting the data by height, gender, and body weight did not influence RD; however, the left kidney was bigger than the right kidney. Also, the influence of height was more pronounced below 1.66m.