Background: Chronic kidney disease is a serious health problem worldwide. Dialysis and renal transplantation, the only therapeutic alternatives for these patients, are expensive and present technical and logistic difficulties. For these reasons, new approaches to treat this condition should be explored.
Methods: Two experimental models were performed in rabbit, porcine and human samples to test the ability of the intestine to filter water and waste products. One model is the everted loop model in which the hydrostatic pressure was increased in the “internal” serosa side. The second one was a not-everted intestinal loop with high vascular pressure. In both models, the filtered volumes were measured and tested for urea, creatinine, ureic nitrogen and albumin.
Results: Both models were performed in rabbit (5-4), porcine (8-4) and human (2-2) samples. The filtered volume was significant in all of the experiments, all of the samples from the filtrates showed a significant concentration of all the measured metabolites, and all of them were negative for albumin.
Conclusions: The intestine has the ability to filter water, urea, creatinine and nitrogenous products, and this ability can be optimized by controlling hydrostatic pressure. In the process, the filtration of albumin was not significant. In the future, this ability can be used to design a surgical technique that can resemble the models explored in this study, which could be useful for CKD patients, possibly impacting their treatment and quality of life.