What is Kidney? Nephron and its functions

The Kidney are a pair of organ situated on the side, posterior wall ‚one of the either side of vertebral column, behind the peritoneum, below the diaphragm.

  • Save
The Kid­ney

They extend from the 12th Tho­racic ver­te­bra to the 3rd lum­bar ver­te­bra. Kid­ney is bean shaped organ about 11cm in length 6cm in wide and 3cm thick. The aver­age of adult kid­ney is 150 gm in male and 130 gm in female. The kid­ney is dark red in color.

Kidney job is to filter the blood. They remove waste, control the body’s fluid balance and keeps tbe right levels of electrolyte.

Nephrons are The functional unit of kidney.

Each kid­ney poss­es about 1.2 mil­lion nephron in man. The nephron is a thin, long, twist­ed tubu­lar structure.

Parts of nephron are:-

  1. Glomeru­lus
  2. Loop of henle
  3. Prox­i­mal Con­vo­lut­ed tubules
  4. Dis­tal Con­vo­lut­ed tubules
  5. Col­lect­ing duct

The Glomeru­lus fil­trate flow from the bow­man’s cap­sule through the PCT, loop of hen­le, DCT and col­lect­ing duct. Then tubules reab­sorb con­sid­er­able amounts of water and dif­fer­ent solutes from the fil­trate chang­ing it to urine. 

Functions of Nephron are

  1. Excre­tion of water
  2. The excre­tion of the end prod­uct of pro­tein metabolism
  3. The excre­tion of ions, reg­u­la­tion of the acid base bal­ance and the ph of blood
  4. The excre­tion of drugs tox­ins and chem­i­cals substances

Leave a Comment

Share via
Copy link
Verified by MonsterInsights