Patients who dialyze daily at home rather than thrice weekly have better outcomes, according to recent research.
“We found that daily dialysis is associated with a 65% improved survival compared to conventional at-home patients,” said lead investigator Bessie Young, MD, MPH, assistant professor of medicine at the University of Washington in Seattle.
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Patients on conventional home hemodialysis are known to have improved survival compared with conventional in-center thrice-weekly dialysis.
Dr. Young and her colleagues studied five-year longitudinal data from the Northwest Kidney Centers’ Home Hemodialysis program. The investigators compared daily and thrice-weekly home hemodialysis. Among the 190 patients trained in the home hemodialysis department, 47 were dialyzing daily.
These patients tended to be younger (mean age 51 years) compared with those on thrice-weekly dialysis (mean age 63 years) and they were much more likely to be men (68% men in the daily hemodialysis group compared with 31% in the thrice-weekly group).
In addition, the daily hemodialysis group was more likely to be white (80.9% vs. 55.9%). More patients in the thrice-weekly dialysis group than in the daily hemodialysis group had diabetes as the primary cause of renal failure (34.3% vs. 23.3%).
