HOUSTON—Longer dialyzing time and higher dialysis dose are independently associated with better survival among patients receiving short daily hemodialysis (SDHD), according to researchers.
Carl Kjellstrand, MD, PhD, clinical professor of medicine at Loyola University in Chicago, and colleagues studied 262 patients (mean age 52 years) who had been on SDHD for a mean of 26 months.
Seventy-two percent of the patients were on home hemodialysis. Their mean dialysis time was 2.3 hours per session and 13.3 hours per week.
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Of the 262 patients, 20% died and 15% received renal transplants. Overall eight-year survival was 54%, Dr. Kjellstrand reported here at the 29th Annual Dialysis Conference.
It increased continuously from 43% in those dialyzing less than 11 hours per week to 87% in those dialyzing more than 15 hours per week.
“Every hour spent dialyzing prolongs survival,” Dr. Kjellstrand concluded. Higher standard Kt/V was associated with better survival. The patient population did not experience excessive weekend deaths, he said. In multivariate analysis, age, weekly dialysis hours, home dialysis, and weekly standard Kt/V were independently associated with survival.
