Blood Supply of the Kidneys - Video Tutorials & Practice Problems
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Blood Supply to the Kidneys
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In this video, we're gonna be talking about blood supply to our kidneys. And this is an important topic because as you may remember, one of our kidneys main jobs is to be filtering our blood and removing any waste products from that blood. So in order for the kidneys to do that, they're gonna be receiving about 1/4 of our total cardiac output. So they're receiving a pretty high volume of blood at any given time. And the blood supply will come into the kidneys from the renal artery and then it will be exiting the kidneys via the renal vein. All right. So looking at this image here, I know that this is a very busy image to look at. It looks a little bit like a mess and I'll be honest bloody to the kidneys is functional but it is not pretty. Um but that's OK. We are gonna go through it one step at a time and as we go through and um talk about each anatomical feature, I'm gonna be highlighting it in green so that you can see where you you should be looking on this image before we do that just to kind of orient you to what you're looking at more generally, what we have is a cortical nephron. Over here on the left, we have a collecting duct there in the middle and then we have a juxta medullary Nephron over here on the right. You can imagine that everything from here up approximately is renal cortex and then everything from here down would be renal medulla, right? So we've got two nephrons with a cortical duct in between them. So that is what we are looking at there, right? The lets dive in to our anatomy. So within the renal cortex, our renal arteries are going to be branching into affluent arterial. So you can see we have this renal artery right here and it's branching into this arterial over here and then this one over here. And the one on the right is feeding a cortical nephron and the one on the left is feeding that juxta Mery Nephron. And if you remember our little trick from our neuro chapter is when we think after we think arrive, right, those A's go together. So this is how blood is arriving at our renal corpuscle. All right. So that is the blood supply coming into our Nephron a through the afferent arterial, right? So blood is arriving and then those affluent arterials feed the glomerular capillaries or that glomerulus that big old ball of capillaries inside of our renal core puzzle. And you guys have seen that before this part's pretty easy. So once our blood has gone through those glomerular capillaries, the glomerular capillaries are then gonna be drained by the efferent arterial. And you remember our little trick efferent exit. So this is how the blood is going to be leaving the um glomerulus and leaving the renal core puss in order to form this very messy network of um capillaries that we are about to look at. Now, one thing to note about the efferent arterial is that the structures that it goes on to form are gonna look a little bit different in our cortical nephrons versus in our juxta medullary nephrons. And I'll explain what that means in just one second, but to kind of keep that in the back of your head. All right. So we have our ephrine arterial blood is exiting our glomerulus and that is going to feed our peritubular capillaries. So our peritubular capillaries are gonna be forming a network around our renal tubule. You can see it's pretty much the entire um Cortical Nephron is gonna be covered in these peritubular capillaries is weaving in and out of that renal tubule all over the place. And then the kind of top half of our juxta Ary Nephron is going to have those peritubular capillaries weaving in and out really mostly on our proximal tubule. And our distal tubule there. And the purpose of these peritubular capillaries is to be reabsorbing water and solute from the tulle cell and we're gonna have many, many videos explaining how that works. But if you don't understand that right now, don't worry about that. Just kind of keep in mind that that is their main. All right. So you can see that these um peritubular capillaries are pretty much covering the renal tubule in our cortical nephron. But there's quite a bit missing from our juxta medullary nephron there. So as I mentioned in our Dex Milari nephrons, we're gonna have another structure that we are working with and those are our vasa recta. So in DEX miri nephrons, these efferent arterials also go on to form the vasa recta. And these are um basically a network of capillaries that are gonna parallel those long nephron loops that dip deep into the renal medulla. And so even though these look very similar to the peritubular capillaries, they do have distinct anatomy, you can see how it's straight and um and how they really do run parallel to those Nephron. Whereas in our peritubular capillaries, there's a lot of kind of weaving in between and coming in and out in movement in those. Um but these have these very straight features. Um and they also play a unique role in that they are gonna help form concentrated urine. You guys remember that Juul nephrons kind of specialize in the creation of concentrated urine and these vas ect to help with that. And we will talk about that um in a in an upcoming video as well. All right. So that is the major anatomy of the blood supply of our kidneys though. I know it's a lot going on here. But big, big takeaways are that the renal artery is the major blood supply of our kidney. The renal vein is where all that blood is exiting our kidney. We have our ain arterials that um where the blood is arriving, coming into our Nephron. We have our EPH arterial where the blood is going to be exiting or leaving our Nephron. And then our peritubular capillaries are gonna be forming networks around our renal tubule helping with reabsorption and specifically in our juxta maul nephrons around that Nephron loop. We're gonna have this very unique structure called our V recta. All right, great job with that one. You guys and I will see you all in our next video. Bye bye.
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example
Blood Supply of the Kidneys Example 1
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38s
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OK. So this one asks us juxta miri nephrons play a role in forming concentrated urine. Based on that knowledge, which of the following structures must also play a role in forming concentrated urine. So we are looking for a structure that is unique to juxtamedullary Nephron. Though based on that, our answer must be C Vasa recta. Remember, affluent arterials are just the arterials that are entering our glomerular capsule. Our renal arteries are supplying the entire kidney with blood and the glomerular capillaries are the capillaries inside of our glomeruli. So our answer here is the vasa.
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Problem
Problem
The arteriole that exits the glomerular capillaries and goes on to form the peritubular capillaries is the:
A
Afferent arteriole.
B
Efferent arteriole.
C
Vasa recta.
D
Renal vein.
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