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During the congress, E-Posters will be accessible to all participants on the congress website 24/7, as well as in the E-poster stations in the congress center.
Preparing your E-Poster
Please review the E-Poster format requirements carefully when preparing your E-Poster. Should your E-Poster not meet the mentioned requirements, it may not be displayed as described above.
E-Poster Submission Deadline
Please prepare and upload your E-Poster no later than March 14, 2026 11.59PM CET. After this date, you will no longer be able to prepare and upload your E-poster and it will not be displayed and accessible on the congress website.
Please follow the instructions below to input your abstract title.
Abstract titles should be brief and reflect the content of the abstract.
Armed conflicts profoundly disrupt healthcare delivery and accelerate chronic disease progression. While consensus statements highlight risks for kidney patients, few studies provide direct clinical and morphological evidence. We aimed to compare CKD progression before and during the ongoing war in Ukraine, with special attention to frontline regions.
We retrospectively analyzed two cohorts of patients with CKD stages 2–4:
Pre‑war group (2018–2021): 112 patients.
War‑time group (2022–2025): 78 patients with comparable baseline characteristics (age, sex, comorbidities).
Renal biopsies were performed in 32 and 24 patients, respectively. Clinical parameters included blood pressure (BP), estimated GFR (eGFR), albumin‑creatinine ratio (ACR), and therapy responsiveness. Morphological changes were assessed using standard semi‑quantitative scoring. Statistical analysis included t‑tests, χ², and multivariate regression adjusting for age, diabetes, and hypertension.
Compared with the pre‑war cohort, patients during the war demonstrated:
Annual blood pressure changes: mean systolic BP increased by +7 mmHg/year (p=0.03), diastolic BP by +2 mmHg/year (p=0.04).
Accelerated renal decline: annual eGFR slope was steeper by –1.6 ml/min/1.73m²/year (95% CI –2.1 to –1.1; p<0.01).
Albuminuria progression: ACR rose by +19% per year (p=0.02).
Therapy resistance: reduced annual response rates to standard antihypertensive and renoprotective regimens (p=0.04).
Morphological findings: wartime biopsies revealed glomerulosclerosis in 62% vs 38% (p=0.01), interstitial fibrosis in 54% vs 31% (p=0.02), and more severe vascular remodeling, indicating faster structural deterioration.
Regional differences: in frontline Kharkiv areas, the annual eGFR decline reached –2.3 ml/min/1.73m²/year compared to –1.2 ml/min/1.73m²/year in relatively safer regions (p<0.05), with correspondingly more aggressive morphological patterns.
Our findings provide statistically robust evidence that armed conflict accelerates the annual progression of CKD, both clinically and morphologically. Patients exposed to war conditions demonstrated faster yearly decline in eGFR, poorer blood pressure control, rising albuminuria, and more severe structural damage on biopsy, with the steepest changes observed in frontline regions. These results highlight that conflict acts as a catalyst of premature renal aging and therapeutic resistance.
For clinical practice, this underscores the need for:
intensified monitoring of CKD patients in conflict‑affected areas;
earlier initiation of renoprotective strategies;
integration of psychosocial and nutritional support into standard care;
deployment of mobile nephrology and dialysis units to ensure continuity of treatment.
At the policy level, we propose that international nephrology societies to formally recognize “conflict‑zone nephrology” as a distinct domain, establish multinational registries to track long‑term renal outcomes, and develop guideline adaptations for populations exposed to war.
