Definition
Plain language
A number doctors use to gauge how well your kidneys are filtering your blood — lower means worse.
As stated in the literature
Estimated glomerular filtration rate, the standard clinical measure of kidney function; used by medical-reasoning agents like ATHENA-R1 as a threshold for whether a drug such as metformin remains safe to prescribe.
Why it matters: It gives clinicians and medical AI a concrete threshold for deciding whether a drug is safe to prescribe as kidney function changes.
For example, a doctor checking a patient's eGFR might decide the number has dropped too low to safely continue a certain medication.
Heard on the show
“… the plan it lands on is concrete — keep the metformin at its current dose, since it's safe above an eGFR of forty-five, but write in an explicit threshold to cut it if kidney function drops; keep the ACE …”Episode 187 — An 8-Billion Agent That Beats Models 80 Times Its Size By Looking Things Up