Patients suffering from kidney failure have to constantly resort to kidney dialysis three-times-a-week. This means a good amount of their time spent at clinics. Now however there is a time saving mechanism to consider - kidney dialysis overnight and at home.
This means that the patients now have several hours that would have been otherwise spent hooked up to a machine for kidney dialysis, added to their day.
In a two-and-a-half year study of the night-time treatment at the Foothills Medical Centre, Canada, the findings of which have been published in the journal of the American Medical Association, and were presented on Friday at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology in St. Louis, 25 patients who were receiving the conventional type of dialysis were compared to 26 patients who had started receiving night time dialysis at home.
The latter had learned to connect themselves to bedside machines for five or six nights in a week and received their eight hours of dialysis while they slept. In comparison, patients who had come in for the day time treatment received only twelve hours of dialysis each week.
Chan and his team studied and compared three groups of patients who had been cross-matched for gender, age, and reasons for dialysis. The first 12 subjects were conventional dialysis patients, ten were nocturnal hemodialysis patients and the last ten were healthy people who did not need dialysis.
The results showed a noteworthy difference between the patients on conventional hemodialysis and the two other groups. Their EPC number and migration function were noticeably weakened and they had higher blood pressure compared to the patients on night time dialysis.
Besides this, patients on conventional day dialysis of about four hours for each session had complications such as low energy and retention of fluids in the body, and abnormal thickness of the heart. They were necessarily put on strict diets. This was not the case with the patients on night time dialysis.
With standard three-times-a-week daytime dialysis, one of the usual outcomes was a progression of calcium buildup Chan and his team wondered if this tendency could be slowed with nighttime dialysis, which offers patients a much higher frequency of sessions, and about six to eight hours of dialysis five or six nights each week.
The team of researchers compared the coronary artery CT scans of 14 end-stage kidney disease patients previous to beginning the nighttime dialysis, and then examined them one year later after beginning the at-home sessions. They discovered that the longer, more frequent sessions worked positively in that there was less calcium build up.
From the University of Calgary, Dr. Bruce Culleton said, “This new type of dialysis reduces the negative effects of kidney disease on the heart, and in doing so, we believe this reduces the risk of future heart attack, heart failure and sudden death.”
Kidney specialist at Toronto General Hospital, and lead researcher, Dr. Christopher Chan, sounded elated. "We are very encouraged by the results of this study. The quality of life of someone who can perform their own dialysis at home at night is much better.”
Dr. Braden Manns, nephrologist at the Foothills Medical Centre, remarked, “It thins out the heart, and that's a good thing. People with thick hearts have a higher chance of dying, and treatments that reduce the thickness of the heart in the general population are associated with improved survival.”
The night dialysis patients also reported sleeping more soundly with the machine on than previously without it as they no longer feel nauseous.
Besides this the patients themselves were glad to see fewer interruptions to their lifestyles.
