We noticed this news item popping up in many news sites, based on a recent research article in the New England Journal of Medicine.
The doctors involved looked at a large number of patients (32,065 to be exact) from the End Stage Renal Disease Clinical Performance Measures Project - a project that gives a representative sample of patients on hemodialysis three times a week. They found that there was an increased risk of heart problems and a low tolerance of metabolic deviations from the normal range.
They suggest that with three day a week dialysis - eg Monday, Wednesday, Friday - the longer gap between the Friday and Monday treatments may be a bit too long. Evidence showed that death rates and hospital admittance rates were higher on the day after the two day gap than at other times. This suggests that the higher level of accumulated toxins at that point in the treatment may be causing these patients problems.
Dialysis patients and their family should perhaps be on the look out for problems and poorer health at the longer gap point in their weekly schedule.
