It was a sunny day at the beach in Southern California. Allana and Trent were paddling out to enjoy their first wave of the day. In an instant everything changed. A wave knocked Allana off her surfboard. The board hit her on the back of her head. She was unconscious. She began breathing in salt water. As her lungs filled, she sank.

When you started dialysis were you told about the option of treating yourself at home either with an artificial kidney or with peritoneal dialysis? A survey of more than 1,000 patients showed only about 12 percent were offered the option of home hemodialysis.

Imagine an in-center hemodialysis program that doesn’t intrude on your daily schedule, delivers better results and makes you feel better than conventional dialysis. That’s nocturnal dialysis.

In order to understand why pregnancy in the setting of renal replacement therapy constitutes a significant medical event, it helps to understand how pregnancy affects women with normal kidney function. During pregnancy blood vessels become dilated leading to lowered blood pressure.

On May 9, 2007, the U.S. Food and Drug Administratio issued a public health advisory outlining new safety information about ESAs . This included a new black box warning advising physicians to adjust the ESA dose to maintain the lowest hemoglobin level needed to avoid the need for a blood transfusion.

Remember the Waltons, from the 1970’s TV show Walton’s Mountain? Four generations were living together in the same home: grandparents, parents, seven children, and eventually the children’s children. The family members operated as a team, full of collective wisdom and insight.

As if a diagnosis of end stage renal disease (ESRD) is not enough, according to the United States Renal Data System (USRDS) one-third of people with ESRD get hit with a double whammy… a cancer diagnosis. ESRD patients are already dealing with a difficult disease, which impacts quality of life on many levels.

Answer: The overriding factor is patient safety. To assure a safe treatment, staff may not be able to satisfy all patient comfort requests, such as keeping the access site covered.

A correlation between method of administration and clinical result achieved has been known for erythropoietin use in dialysis patients for a decade (NEJM). Application of this knowledge has not been the usual practice, however.

Answer: In projecting how long an individual is likely to survive after the onset of what is called end-stage renal disease (ESRD), the key factors are: 1. Patient age and gender, 2. Cause of kidney failure, and 3. Method of treatment.