Following this, the Work Group, KDIGO Co-Chairs and KDIGO support staff met held a two-day meeting to revisit the available evidence, formulate recommendation statements, deliberate on rationale for recommendations, and to develop consensus. Commissioning of Work Group and ERT The KDIGO Co-Chairs appointed the Work Group Co- Chairs, who then assembled the Work Group of domain experts, including individuals with expertise in internal medicine, adult and pediatric nephrology, cardiology, hypertension, pharmacology, epidemiology, and endocrino- logy. The Tufts Center for Kidney Disease Guideline Development and Implementation at Tufts Medical Center in Boston, Massachusetts, USA, was contracted to conduct systematic evidence review and provide expertise in guideline development methodology. The ERT consisted of physician - methodologists with expertise in nephrology and evidence- based clinical practice guideline development, a project coordinator, a research assistant, and a project manager/ medical writer. Defining Scope and Topics The Work Group Co-Chairs and the ERT defined the overall scope and goals of the guideline (including a list of critical and important outcomes) and then drafted a preliminary list of topics and key clinical questions. They also reviewed the topics in the KDOQI guideline,1 which the ERT also had helped to develop. The Work Group and ERT further developed and refined each topic and specified screening criteria, literature search strategies, and data extraction forms (Table 6). Establishing the Process for Guideline Development The ERT performed systematic literature searches and organized abstract and article screening. The ERT also coordinated the methodological and analytical processes, and defined and standardized the methodology for perform- ing literature searches, data extraction, and summarizing the evidence. The Work Group took the primary role of writing the recommendation statements and rationales and retained final responsibility for their content. 