Kalantar-Zadeh is a
professor of medicine at the
David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA and based at the Lundquist Institute for Biomedical Innovation at
Harbor–UCLA Medical Center (2000-2012, and since 2023), where he worked with his former mentor
Joel D. Kopple and served as the founding director of the
Harold Simmons Center for Chronic Disease Research and Epidemiology. During 2012-2022 Kalantar-Zadeh was in the
University of California, Irvine School of Medicine as a
tenured
professor of
medicine,
pediatrics,
public health, and
Nursing Sciences, and chief of
Nephrology, and the
UC Irvine Medical Center. He also serves as a part-time staff physician at Tibor-Rubin VA Medical center in
Long Beach,
California, under the
Veterans Health Administration. Kalantar-Zadeh has remained a professor of
epidemiology at Fielding
UCLA School of Public Health. Kalantar-Zadeh has authored or coauthored over 1,100 research articles and reviews, which have been cited nearly 100,000 times, giving him an
h-index of >150. In addition, Kalantar-Zadeh was editor-in-chief of the
Journal of Renal Nutrition, and is an
associate editor of the
Journal of Cachexia, Sarcopenia and Muscle, and
Clinical Nutrition, and a member of the
editorial boards of the
Nephrology Dialysis Transplantation,
Kidney International,
American Journal of Kidney Diseases,
Nutrients, and several other peer reviewed journals in Nephrology and Nutrition. Kalantar-Zadeh is the past president of the
International Society of Renal Nutrition and Metabolism and the past chair of the international steering committee of the
World Kidney Day, and current president of the
National Forum of the ESRD Networks, the coalition of the 18 congressionally mandated
End Stage Renal Disease Program network organizations since 1978. Kalantar-Zadeh first proposed
reverse epidemiology in articles in the journal
Kidney International in 2003 and in the
Journal of the American College of Cardiology in 2004. It is a contradiction to prevailing concepts of prevention of
atherosclerosis and
cardiovascular disease. In an interview with
Nature Magazine in 2016, Kalantar-Zadeh stated that
obesity is like “that guy who led you to prison, [but] becomes your friend in prison." Kalantar-Zadeh has also contributed extensively to the fields of
dialysis and kidney disease
nutrition including an invited review paper in the
New England Journal of Medicine in 2017 on nutritional management of
chronic kidney disease, in that he recommends
low protein diet for conservative management of
chronic kidney disease to delay
dialysis initiation but
high protein diet for
dialysis patients without residual kidney function. Kalantar-Zadeh has published extensively on
chronic kidney disease and
end-stage renal disease including
kidney dialysis with focus on incremental transition to dialysis therapy with initially less frequent
hemodialysis treatment. Kalantar-Zadeh has first-authored three review and perspective articles in the
New England Journal of Medicine including a 2013 case records paper on
metabolic acidosis due to
metformin toxicity, a 2017 renal nutrition review paper., and a 2020 perspective article on ensuring choice for people with
kidney failure. as well as a 2021 review paper in
The Lancet on
kidney preserving therapy in persons with
chronic kidney disease. == References ==