CD68 and chronic kidney disease: In addition, it has been shown that CD45+ and CD68+ immune cells may promote inflammation in the kidney, thereby perpetuating kidney fibrosis (Sakai et al., 2006; Kisseleva and Brenner, 2008; Wada et al., 2011; Liu et al., 2015; Qiu et al., 2019); the expression of these markers was strongly increased in the kidney tissue of CKD HFD mice.