Kidney Disease in Pets, Explained Like You're a Five Year Old
Kidney Disease in Pets, Explained Like You're a Five Year Old.
What Dr. Conor Brady said about glutathione, curcumin, and muscle at the 2026 DokRisk Summit, told as a bedtime story with his slides.
Slides are screenshots from the presentation recording.
Kidneys are the body's cleaners
Kidneys wash out the gunk. When a kitty or doggy has kidney disease, the cleaners get tired and the gunk starts piling up.
Dr. Brady's talk was about a cleanup crew inside the body that helps the kidneys, and what happens when that crew runs short of supplies.
Every tiny cell makes little messes
Think of a kid playing and spilling juice all day. Cells do the same thing while they work. Those little messes are called ROS. The body has a cleanup helper called glutathione that mops them up, so nothing gets sticky and broken.
When there's too much mess, the cell calls for help. A signal called NRF2 works like a walkie-talkie: "We need more mops over here!"
But if there aren't enough mops, the mess wins. Cells get damaged, and the gunk (BUN and toxins) builds up. That's step 3 on the slide, where the problem is allowed to progress.
Curcumin yells for mops, but doesn't bring them
Curcumin is the yellow spice in turmeric. A study in 16 kitties with kidney disease found that curcumin seemed to help their kidneys.
But Dr. Brady says curcumin is like the person yelling "get more mops!" It doesn't bring any mops. The box on the earlier slide, "How Curcumin Helps," spells out why:
- It does not provide the glutathione.
- The body has no special door (receptor) for it.
- The belly does its best to keep it out.
So curcumin can't do the whole job by itself.
Sick kidney pets are running out of mop-making stuff
Studies found that kitties and doggies with kidney disease have less of the machines that make mops.
Doggies also had less cysteine (say "SIS-teen"), one of the main ingredients for making mops. Dogs who had lost muscle were low on even more ingredients.
Muscles are the pantry
The body keeps its ingredients stored in muscle. When the pantry runs empty, there's nothing left to make mops with.
Muscle mass and survival in dogs with kidney disease. Vendramini et al., J Anim Physiol Anim Nutr, 2026.
3.85×
higher risk of dying for dogs with severe muscle loss, compared with dogs with normal muscle. That's almost 4 times.
And here's the sneaky part: a dog can still look chubby while the muscle is quietly disappearing.
Then came a study in grandparents
Older adults were given two ingredients, glycine and NAC, together called GlyNAC.
GlyNAC in older adults. Kumar et al., J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci, 2023.
Their mops came back. Their cells had less damage, and they got stronger: they walked faster and gripped harder. It even seemed to fix the mop-making machines themselves. Dr. Brady called those enzymes "the machinery."
So the idea is to bring the ingredients, not just yell for help.
The catch
That last study was in people, not pets, and the cat study was small. So this is a promising idea, not a guarantee. If your pet has kidney disease, ask your vet before giving anything new. The right amount, the right form, and how it mixes with other medicines all matter.
Papers shown in the talk
- Ilgün M, Aktaş MS. Renoprotective effects of curcumin in cats with chronic kidney disease.J Vet Intern Med. 2026;40(4):aalag138. doi:10.1093/jvimsj/aalag138 · PMID 42462212
- Li Q, Cominetti O, Holzwarth JA, Summers S, Wang X, Dayon L. Integrated multi-omics analysis of renal metabolism in domestic cats with spontaneous chronic kidney disease.Commun Biol. 2025;8:1794. doi:10.1038/s42003-025-09164-8 · PMID 41390888
- Lippi I, Perondi F, Pierini A, Bartoli F, Gori E, Mariti C, Marchetti V. Essential and non-essential amino acids in dogs at different stages of chronic kidney disease.Vet Sci. 2022;9(7):331. doi:10.3390/vetsci9070331 · PMID 35878348
- Vendramini THA, Marchi PH, Pedrinelli V, et al. Muscle mass is a better predictor of survival in dogs with chronic kidney disease compared to body condition score.J Anim Physiol Anim Nutr (Berl). 2026;110(4):496–505. doi:10.1111/jpn.70061 · PMID 42021541
- Kumar P, Liu C, Suliburk J, et al. Supplementing glycine and N-acetylcysteine (GlyNAC) in older adults improves glutathione deficiency, oxidative stress, mitochondrial dysfunction, inflammation, physical function, and aging hallmarks: a randomized clinical trial.J Gerontol A Biol Sci Med Sci. 2023;78(1):75–89. doi:10.1093/gerona/glac135 · PMID 35975308