Repository for the Family Investigation of Nephropathy & Diabetes

糖尿病肾病（DN）是一种多因素疾病，并且大部分受1型或2型糖尿病影响的患者发展为糖尿病肾病并进展为终末期肾病（ESRD）。当预后不良的因素如高血压和慢性高血糖得到积极治疗时，糖尿病肾病的进展速度可以减缓。然而，没有任何干预措施能可靠地阻止糖尿病肾病的进展。许多研究表明，糖尿病肾病的遗传易感性存在，但肾病的基因尚未分离。预计对大量的统一表型的ESRD家族进行综合分析将是分离ESRD基因所必需的。任何一个机构都可能没有这样的家庭数据库。FIND联盟的任务是获得具有良好特征的糖尿病肾病的家庭和个人的集合，建立安全的主FIND数据库，并使用遗传技术来识别与糖尿病肾病相关的染色体区域，以识别糖尿病肾病易感性或保护基因。在FIND期间收集的样本的储存库对于FIND研究实现其目标以及对这一宝贵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.