Hospitalized patients who recover from acute kidney injury (AKI) requiring dialysis are at increased risk of stroke and death compared with those who did not have AKI, a new study suggests.
Vin-Cent Wu, MD, PhD, of National Taiwan University Hospital in Taipei, and colleagues enrolled 4,315 patients who recovered from dialysis-requiring AKI and compared them with a matched group of 4,315 control patients without AKI or stroke. After a median follow-up of 3.36 years, the rate of incident stroke was 15.6 per 1,000 person-years.
Compared with controls, the AKI-recovery group had a significant 25% increased risk of stroke as well as an increased severity of stroke events in adjusted analyses, the researchers reported online ahead of print in the Journal of the American Heart Association. After hospital discharge, the rate of incident stroke was statistically similar in patients with diabetes alone (without AKI) and in those with AKI alone (without diabetes), the researchers noted.
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In addition, the AKI-recovery group had a significant 2.4 times increased risk of death compared with the control group.
“Our results suggest that a public health initiative is needed to monitor and control subsequent stroke among patients with dialysis-requiring AKI, even among those whose kidney function has recovered after discharge, because dialysis-requiring AKI may hasten subsequent long-term stroke events and mortality,” the authors concluded.
