Three patients with end stage renal disease mark the first to successfully receive blood vessels engineered in a lab from human skin cells. Following additional testing, "off the shelf" blood vessels could be as readily available as medical gauze.

Knowing that you're at risk for certain health problems makes it easier to take steps to avoid those problems. Now, kidney disease patients have a way to know if they are headed for trouble.

While dialysis is an important way to keep kidney disease patients alive, it can also cause other health problems. Now, a team of students has created a tool to make dialysis safer.

Going to a dialysis center day after day can be a huge strain on people with kidney failure. That's why many patients do dialysis at home. Now, there may be another reason to do dialysis at home.

Sometimes, doctors can look for signs in patients to see if they are at risk for complication from a disease further down the road. This lets the doctors help their patients to take steps to avoid that problem.

In recent years, treatment for lupus nephritis (kidney damage caused by lupus) has gotten better. Yet outcomes for many patients with the disease still do not look good.

When a person suffers kidney failure, their kidneys can no longer remove waste from the body. The best fix for kidney failure is an organ transplant, but the wait for a new kidney can take years.

There has been mounting concern that surgeon fatigue has been leading to dangerous conditions for transplant patients. This was especially true of late night transplants if that is when a donor organ is available. New research from John Hopkins University School of Medicine suggests it's simply not the case.

For many men, dealing with an enlarged prostate just means waiting it out. However, others may need surgery to avoid the most harmful effects of an enlarged prostate, including kidney damage. Now, research shows that some men aren't getting surgery when they need it.

Ron Springs, former running back for the Dallas Cowboys, died last Thursday from a heart attack, according to the Cowboys website. He was 54 years old.