The Significance of Necrotizing Pyelonephritis in Diabetes Mellitus

This is the authors' abstract. We don't add key points for this paper.

While the physician treating patients with diabetes mellitus devotes much attention to the early discovery of infections, the importance of the infections involving the urinary tract has been underestimated. It is our purpose in this paper to discuss a severe form of urinary tract infection in patients with diabetes and the stages by which the final changes come about. The end result is a necrotizing pyelonephritis with extensive destruction of renal tissue. This complication of diabetes, unless recognized in its incipience, leads to a fatal termination. Most of the features of this form of pyelonephritis are seen occasionally in patients not suffering from diabetes. However, the severity, rapid progression and extent of necrosis of renal tissue are hardly to be found in the absence of diabetes. In some recent surveys of the complications of diabetes, the infections of the urinary tract have not appeared especially common. 1 However, in others,