Kidneys also speak Spanish: Initiatives towards standardisation of our nephrology nomenclature | Nefrología

For all these reasons, with great consideration for all these initiatives that have already been launched, we underline the need to share with all Spanish-speaking nephrologists the remaining points of discussion, some of them reflected in this article. In fact, for the elaboration of a final, broad and shared consensus document, we will have to make concessions (linguistically speaking) since, being the same language (Spanish), there are terms that are more familiar to us depending on where we received our training without considering that the “not chosen” terms are incorrect. The uniformity and homogenization of terms acquires greater relevance every day when we think about efficiency, not only in our bibliographic searches but, even more importantly, anticipating and thinking about Artificial Intelligence/Machine – Learning tools and the exploitation of Big-Data.29 In this way, the implementation of computerized medical records is generating a large volume of data that offers a great opportunity to promote knowledge of diseases, improve daily clinical practice, research and education.29 Obviously, a key point for structuring medical information is to encode each variable so that it is unique and correctly defined to allow technical and semantic interoperability between different databases allowing exchange of information. In this sense, beyond the ICD mentioned, there are general initiatives such as the Simple Knowledge Organization System (SKOS), (http://skos.um.es/unesco6/00),2929b the project of international standardidazation of nomenclature for science and technology, Logical Observation Identifiers Names and Codes (LOINC),2929c (http://loinc.org), or the creation of a dictionary of clinical terminologies using international standards such as the Systematized Nomenclature of Medicine -Clinical Terms (SNOMED-CT),2929d which is the broadest, most accurate and comprehensive codified clinical multilingual terminology, developed in the world.

Finally, we believe that it is important to highlight that it is no longer a question of defending our common language and that “renal” is our natural adjective for the kidney in the scientific field, but rather and above all, we clinicians cannot forget that, in the current scenario the individual patient plays a central role in making decisions that must be shared.23,30 This fact is particularly relevant in our specialty, where the degree of evidence of our decisions and clinical actions are generally more in the degree of “suggestions” (evidence grade 2) than that of “recommendations” (grade 1).30 Therefore, we cannot forget that, for our patients, what is really fundamental is not that we scientists or nephrologists use to understand each other by using a common scientific language, but rather that our “kidney” (“renal”) patient understands from us by using plain words of any origin, adapted individually, and even resorting to colloquial or more popular language, whether we are for him “nefró-logos” or “riñón-logos”.23

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The production of this editorial has not received any financial support.

Conflict of interests

The authors have no conflicts of interest related to this article.