By Scott Buzby
Free weekly deliveries of fresh fruits and vegetables alongside nutritional counseling significantly reduced blood sugar among adults with type 2 diabetes, a speaker reported.
Read the article in Healio.
By Mark E. Neumann
PHILADELPHIA — The percent of patients who choose home dialysis within the first year of treatment varies by country, a study presented here showed.
“There is a wide variability in home dialysis use from a high of 50% of patients receiving home dialysis in New Zealand to less than 10% in France,” Annabel Boyer, MD, of the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Caen, Caen, Basse-Normandie, France, and colleagues from Canada, Australia, the United States and the United Kingdom wrote in the poster. Read the article in Healio.
By Shawn M. Carter
PHILADELPHIA — Patients with kidney disease who opted to withdraw from dialysis typically survived around 1 week, according to data presented at ASN Kidney Week.
Researchers conducted a retrospective analysis of patients referred to a kidney supportive care service who stopped hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis between 2016 and 2023.
Read the full article in Healio.
By David Warmflash, MD
Nearly 90,000 patients in the United States are waiting for a lifesaving kidney transplant, yet only about 25,000 kidney transplants were performed last year. Thousands die each year while they wait. Others are not suitable transplant candidates.
Half a million people are on dialysis, the only transplant alternative for those with kidney failure. This greatly impacts their work, relationships, and quality of life. Read the full story in Medscape.
By Michele Sullivan
Patients on maintenance dialysis had somewhat higher rates of SARS-CoV-2 infections and related deaths than seen in the general U.S. population, although immunization mitigated some of the excess risk, the CDC reported.
From June 30, 2021, to Sept. 27, 2022, the overall infection rate per 10,000 patient-weeks was 30.47 among maintenance dialysis patients, with a range from 20.13-46.45 across the different waves of variants compared with 17.13-43.62 per 10,000 population-weeks in the general population. Read the full article in MedPage Today.
By Mark E. Neumann
Kidney Care Partners, a coalition of 30 organizations involved in kidney care, said it was “extremely concerned” about a proposal by CMS to increase the Medicare bundled payment rate by 1.6% next year, according to a press release.
The proposed additional payment, about half of the increase that CMS agreed to pay dialysis providers in 2023, “fails to heed calls from the kidney care community for meaningful relief to address the ongoing workforce crisis,” Kidney Care Partners (KCP) said in the release.
Read the full article in Healio.
By Shawn M. Carter
Despite improvement over time, patients on dialysis have a risk for infection-related death that is 20 times that of the general population, according to recently published data.
Researchers, who presented findings in the American Journal of Kidney Diseases, evaluated long-term trends and risks for infection-related death in patients receiving maintenance dialysis in Australia and New Zealand. Read the full article in Healio.
ORLANDO — Patients with chronic kidney disease who choose home dialysis have improved health-related quality of life prior to dialysis dependence compared with patients on other modalities, according to a presenter at ASN Kidney Week.
However, less than half of patients in the study chose home dialysis as their treatment modality. Read more in Healio.
Financial incentives to encourage home dialysis may be falling flat, according to a first-year analysis of Medicare’s End-Stage Renal Disease (ESRD) Treatment Choices (ETC) Model.
Compared with controls, ESRD facilities and managing clinicians practicing within a hospital referral region randomized to receive financial incentives only increased the number of new patients with home dialysis in the first 90 days of treatment by a non-significant 0.12% (P=0.88), reported Yunan Ji, PhD, of Georgetown University in Washington, D.C., and colleagues. Read the full story in MedPage Today.
Dialysis providers deployed disaster response teams this past week along the coast of Florida to assess the damage from Hurricane Ian while watching its path into Georgia and the Carolinas.
“Hurricane Ian impacted multiple U.S. Renal Care dialysis clinics along the west coast of Florida from Tampa to Naples, leaving many clinics without power, water, internet or phone access,” Mary Dittrich, MD, chief medical officer of U.S. Renal Care, told Healio.
Read the full story from Healio.