Repository for the Family Investigation of Nephropathy & Diabetes (FIND)

糖尿病肾病（DN）是一种多因素疾病，很大比例的1型或2型糖尿病患者发展为糖尿病肾病并进展为终末期肾病（ESRD）。当高血压和慢性高血糖等不良预后因素得到积极治疗时，糖尿病肾病的进展速度可以减慢。然而，没有任何干预措施被证明可以可靠地阻止糖尿病肾病的进展。大量研究表明糖尿病肾病的遗传易感性存在，但肾病的基因尚未被分离出来。预计对大量统一表型的ESRD家族进行综合分析将是分离ESRD基因的必要条件。这样的家庭数据库可能无法在任何一个机构中获得。FIND联盟的任务是获取具有明确特征的糖尿病肾病的家族和个体，建立一个安全的FIND主数据库，并利用遗传技术鉴定与糖尿病肾病相关的染色体区域，以确定糖尿病肾病的易感性或保护基因。在FIND期间收集的样本库对于FIND研究实现其目标以及对这一有价值的样本收集的后续研究至关重要。

Diabetic nephropathy (DN) is a multifactoral disease, and a large proportion of patients affected with either type 1 or type 2 diabetes develop diabetic nephropathy and progress to end stage renal disease (ESRD). When poor prognostic factors such as hypertension and chronic hyperglycemia are aggressively treated, the rate of progression of diabetic nephropathy can be slowed. However, no interventions have been shown to reliably halt the progression of diabetic nephropathy. Numerous studies have suggested that genetic predisposition to diabetic nephropathy exists, but genes for nephropathy have not yet been isolated. It is anticipated that a comprehensive analysis of a large number of uniformly phenotyped ESRD families will be necessary to isolated genes for ESRD. Such a database of families may not be available at any single institution. The charge of the FIND consortium was to acquire sets of families and individuals with well-characterized diabetic nephropathy, establish a secure master FIND database, and use genetic technologies to identify chromosomal regions linked with diabetic nephropathy in order to identify diabetic nephropathy susceptibility or protection genes. A Repository of samples collected during the FIND is essential for the FIND study to achieve its goals and for subsequent studies of this valuable sample collection.