We intend to report worthy news items on kidney dialysis and also on renal failure in general. Hopefully this will help suffers of kidney disease keep up to date with relevant information, such as problems caused by other medications, improvements in treatments, and anything else that takes our fancy. Which will include non-news items occasionally.
Dr Ray Ulan does, it was 21st December 1962, in Edmonton, Canada. He carried out the first hemodialysis treatment in Canada - what did you think I was discussing? ;)
The patient was Diane Sutton, 17 years old and expected to die, because that's what happened back then when your kidneys failed. And she nearly did, as part of the new equipment was missing.
Years later, Ulan would eventually lead Edmonton’s burgeoning nephrology specialty, watching dialysis improve and more patients receive successful transplants until his retirement a few years ago. Dialysis currently helps over 1,100 patients at 22 sites in northern Alberta.
St George’s Hospital in London and Central Manchester University Hospital are trialling a new implant for hemodialysis patients, in an attempt to reduce scar tissue formation associated with traditional methods of attaching patients to machines.
The system they are testing is called Optiflow, made by BioConnect Systems. Eric Chemla, Consultant Renal Transplant and Vascular Surgeon at St George’s, who was the first surgeon in Europe to fit the tube, says: ‘There has been a huge rise in the demand for dialysis in recent years because of lifestyle-related illnesses such as diabetes.
‘This device has the potential to improve and save the lives of so many and, depending on long-term results, should be rolled out nationally by 2013.’
The strange thing is a search on google suggests that this is a system mentioned in 2010 as having European certification, and other instants have dates of 2006. So has the UK been sitting around ignoring new developments, or is this a new model? Or is it just the Daily Mail (link below)being slow to report on things? ;)
The Optiflow system was the subject of a research paper by some of the same team (plus others from outside the UK), published back in April 2012, which you can read here., while an earlier article from January 2011 mentions the device and describes the first UK implant as having taken place. This article has some nice graphics of the system as well.
AWAK Technologies attracted a fair bit of interest with their portable peritoneal dialysis unit, and our post on their device has been among one of the most popular. Now they have turned their attention to hemodialysis.
The special feature of their portable unit is the way it recycles the dialysate, thus reducing the volume of liquid required. They say it can be recycled indefinitely. Something which would help keep the cost of treatment down. Conventional hemodialysis uses about 120 litres of ultra-pure water to make the dialysate used in a single treatment, and the used dialysate is discarded. Just a bit wasteful.
The AWAK sorbent unit requires less than 6 litres of tap water and regenerates and reconstitutes spent dialysate into fresh dialysate. This unique feature eliminates the needs for expensive purification water system, thus, enabling dialysis to be performed in areas where such supplies are lacking. Less water equates to significantly less energy for heating the dialysate. AWAK say that their sorbent technology can be adapted to suit different dialysis modes and machines, and is smaller than current sorbent systems, which enables development of more portable devices. In earthquake victims, where Rhabdomyolysis can reduce the survival rates without proper treatment, portable units could help those who didn't get the proper treatment they initially needed and are at risk of ending up with damaged kidneys.
The sorbent system used was co-invented by Dr. David B. N. Lee and Dr. Martin Roberts (both of the Veterans Affairs Greater Los Angeles Healthcare System and the David Geffen School of Medicine at UCLA), and their technology has been exclusively licensed by the University of California at Los Angeles and the Department of Veteran Affairs to AWAK Technologies
Hurricane Sandy caused dreadful problems, some of which are still around, when it hit America. Dialysis patients had some extra problems.
Clinics needed to use generators when their patients turned up, but those on home dialysis had problems with the power outage as well, as explained in this video report from EverydayHealth.
With winter approaching we strongly recommend you read this article on preparing yourself for problems in bad weather. It has some good advice which should help disaster proof the lives of those on dialysis.
Medical staff having a general conversation with patients for anywhere from 5 - 30 mins (but the actual time doesn't seem to matter much, 5 - 10 mins is perfectly okay) was found to be beneficial. "We found that just 'talking' about non-treatment issues was positive," said lead researcher Judith Beto from Loyola University in Illinois, USA.
Chronic hemodialysis education may result in boredom and disinterest, meaning patients may struggle with noncompliance secondary to depression, explain Beto and team.
The health educators just talked about living with hemodialysis in general, without trying to set an educate the patient goal of any sort.
The research showed that 84% of dialysis patients who received what was called “talking control support therapy” had at least one health improvement activity. The talking between the patients and the techs in the study was more like talking between friends rather than the kind that often occurs in dialysis clinics, with the tech just lecturing the patient for bad lab values. Both the worker and the patient shared information about themselves on a more personal level. The talking also covered issues such as life with dialysis.
"Talking control" is a cognitive behaviour, similar to befriending, which has been studied in depressed older populations in the primary care setting, say the researchers, who believe their findings are the first to use the technique in a dialysis population.
So, next time you're in for dialysis, or monitoring a patient of dialysis, have a chat!
