Editorial Comment Worldwide distribution of glomerular diseases: the role of renal biopsy registries

Many published papers describe the frequency of histolog-ical findings from different biopsy databases all over the world. Ranging in number from hundreds to thousands, these collections sometimes report not only the frequency of the disease but the clinical and demographic correlations, too. However, the data provided are not always comparable mainly because of the lack of a common national renal bi-opsy registry. Polito et al. [1], in their paper, evaluated 9617 native renal biopsies from Brazil during the period 1993– 2007 and reported the frequencies of the different histolog-ical findings. They also take into account demographic and clinical features, present several analysis and compare the results with patterns of glomerular disease distribution all over the world. It is interesting to notice that Brazil encom-passes both the features of developed and developin