Dialysis Six Times A Week For Some Patients Better Than Three

Dialysis Six Times A Week For Some Patients Better Than Three.
Kidney failing patients who double-barrelled the number of weekly dialysis treatments typically prescribed had significantly better sensitivity function, overall health and general quality of life, new scrutinization indicates. The finding stems from an analysis that compared the impact of the 40-year-old standard of concern - three dialysis treatments per week, for three to four hours per period - with a six-day a week treatment regimen involving sessions of 2,5 to three hours per session. Launched in 2006, the similarity involved 245 dialysis patients assigned to either a typical dialysis schedule or the high-frequency option. All participants underwent MRIs to assess pluck muscle structure, and all completed quality-of-life surveys.

In addition to improved cardiovascular healthfulness and overall health, the analysis further revealed that two concerns faced by most kidney failure patients - blood arm-twisting and phosphate level control - also fared better under the more frequent remedying program. Dr Glenn Chertow, chief of the nephrology division at Stanford University School of Medicine, reports his team's observations in the Nov 20, 2010 online copy of the New England Journal of Medicine, to co-occur with a presentation at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology in Denver.

And "Kidneys function seven days a week, 24 hours a day," Chertow respected in a Stanford University news release. "You could imagine why people might feel better if dialysis were to more closely imitative kidney function. But you have to factor in the burden of additional sessions, the rove and the cost".

To the latter point, the authors noted that dialysis is expensive, and Medicare currently only covers the stuffy three-day per week approach, which over the course of a year amounts to somewhere between $75000 to $100000. A doubling of this rod would therefore amount to an expensive proposition for many patients. Another disadvantage was the observation that doubling dialysis treatment also increased the number of procedures patients had to undergo to deal with the subsidiary effects prompted by more frequent insertion of tubes into the body.

That said, the study team suggested that tomorrow's treatment plans should be constructed case-by-case. "I'm certainly not going to recommend six times a week for all my patients," said Chertow, who is also a professor of nostrum at Stanford. "One magnitude does not fit all. For some patients with kidney failure, no dialysis is the right treatment. For others, it's three times a week in-center. For others, it's home-based dialysis. For others, conceivably six times a week".

For his part, Dr Matthew Weir, top dog of the department of nephrology at the University of Maryland School of Medicine in Baltimore, said that the plain benefits of high-frequency dialysis "make a lot of sense". "A normal kidney mechanism 168 hours a week filtering our blood and removing fluid," he explained. "But with dialysis we try to do the same work intermittently just three times a week, for three to four hours each time.

And that's distinctly a major problem for dialysis patients, because it's a very harsh form of flexible removal that can stretch and strain the heart and leave patients feeling unwell," Weir noted. "So I would utter that an increased use of dialysis is a more facile approach to controlling blood volume, because it removes unfixed in a more sustained and more natural way, which the heart prefers advertising graphic design. So ultimately, you have less bloodline on the heart, less heart failure and patients living longer," Weir said.