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Uptake of home dialysis by patients in first year varies by country

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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.

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Study reviews survival timeline in patients who end dialysis

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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.

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Better Than Dialysis? Artificial Kidney Could Be the Future

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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.

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CDC: Dialysis Patients Carry Heavier COVID Burden

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— Vaccination reduced some of the excess risk, agency says

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.

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Kidney doctors push to protect patients by including dialysis machines in emergency stockpile

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By Carrie Arnold

Ariel Brigham was drowning. Hurricane Harvey had dumped over 50 inches of rain across Houston and coastal Texas, leaving the then-26-year-old Texan stranded in her flooded apartment.

But what was killing Brigham wasn’t water from the hurricane. It was the excess fluid and toxins building up in her own body. Read the full story in STAT.

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Infection-related deaths from dialysis have declined but risk remains high

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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.

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Home dialysis improves quality of life prior to dialysis dependence, many do not choose it

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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.

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Kidney Transplant Provides Greater Benefit Than Long-Term Dialysis for Patients With Kidney Failure

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Although survival benefits for patients who received a kidney transplant varied, the benefits of kidney transplants were greater for all patients when compared with long-term dialysis.

All patients who are eligible for a kidney transplant should be able to participate in a transplant program because receiving a kidney transplant was demonstrated to be associated with increased survival compared to long-term dialysis, according to the authors of a recent study published in JAMA Network Open. The study is considered a pioneer in quantifying survival benefit through the use of restricted mean survival time (RMST). Read the full story in Pharmacy Times.

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Medicare is using one of its biggest hammers to try to fix the dialysis system: how providers are paid

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Chronic kidney disease, already a problem affecting millions of Americans, is only expected to become more prevalent as the country ages. For those with end-stage disease, a transplant is the ideal treatment, but dialysis is their reality. Hundreds of thousands of Americans flock to clinics three times a week to have their blood filtered through — in the absence of a functioning kidney — a machine.

As a medical treatment, dialysis is a stopgap measure that fails to fix a chronic problem (average life expectancy on dialysis is five to 10 years). As an industry, dialysis has significant flaws, including a lag in home dialysis use. Read more in STAT.

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Kidney Transplant Survival Benefit Greater for Patients on Dialysis

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Deceased donor kidney transplantation (DDKT) confers a greater survival benefit to adult waitlist candidates on dialysis than those managed preemptively, investigators reported at the 2022 American Transplant Congress (ATC 2022) in Boston, Massachusetts.

The current US Kidney Allocation System (KAS) allows for DDKT candidates not yet on dialysis to accrue waiting time points by listing at a transplant center with a low estimated glomerular filtration rate. Read the full story in Renal & Urology News.

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