The powdery white deposits covering a 52-year-old woman's arms, legs, torso, and scalp looked like frost. Lab tests showed they were urea, a waste product her failing kidneys could no longer clear, left behind on her skin.
The case, published in The New England Journal of Medicine by physicians Muzamil Ahmad Wani and Zeeza Hussain Shah of the Sher-i-Kashmir Institute of Medical Sciences in Srinagar, India, illustrates a sign of kidney failure that doctors now rarely see. It also carries a warning that resonates in the United States, where the latest federal estimates show most adults with chronic kidney disease do not know they have it.
