The prognostic significance of the morphological and clinical characteristics of chronic glomerulonephritis

: In 520 patients followed up for 4 to 20 years a study was made of the relationship between the actual survival time and the morphological and clinical characteristics of chronic glomerulonephritis. A well-defined parallelism was established between the rate of disease progress and the rate of exacerbations as was an unfavorable prognostic importance of marked tubulointerstitial lesions and glomerular sclerosis, which was more manifest in frequent relapses. Considerable differences in the survival of patients with hypertension or associated hypertension and the nephrotic syndrome with varying process activity do not provide evidence in favour of their direct influence on the rate of the disease progress. As far as certain morphological patterns of glomerulonephritis are concerned, the prognosis is different because of specific clinical manifestations and anatomic alterations common to each disease pattern.