Dialy nocturnal hemo news item

[Pierre]

This may be of interest to our community.

Nocturnal dialysis improves heart disease in patients with end-stage kidney failure

A Toronto study comparing night-time hemodialysis patients to patients on thrice-weekly conventional dialysis and healthy patients show that the nightly hemodialysis patients were comparable to the healthy patients on all cardiovascular measures

Rest of article at:
http://www.eurekalert.org/pub_releases/2005-09/aps-ndi093005.php

The daily nocturnal hemo program I'm in is patterned after the Toronto one. They have about 65 patients, we have about 20 currently. The limiting factor is not interested patients but how many can be trained per year with the current funding.

Pierre

[Anonymous]

pierre what is you program like how many nights do you dialyze and are you monitored. i have been wanting to move from the chair to the bed. bit still afraid of pulling a needle. how do you do it

[Pierre]

Hi Terry

I dialyze 6 nights per week, but I occasionally skip an extra night. In my program, the length of a treatment can vary from 6 to 8 hours. This is pretty much left up to the patient, but they require you to choose 6, 7 or 8 hours and to stick to it more or less consistently (but I can still vary it if I want to). A 6 or 7 hour treatment means you have to get on an hour or so later unless you want to get up really early in the morning to take yourself off. So, at least 7 hours seems good to me, and 8 hours is ideal, because it means you won't be putting yourself on too late (when you're already sleepy) while not having to get up before 6am. The maximum of 8 hours could be longer, but in my program, we use pre-mixed acid and bicarbonate jugs, and these would run out of concentrate if treatments were longer than 8 hours. But trust me, 8 hours is plenty.

The way they teach you to tape up is extremely secure (I've posted about it in detail elsewhere on this board), plus, you have a leak detector. If I have time, I'll try to find my post about that later.

No, I'm not monitored at all. It's not really necessary if you do everything the way it's supposed to be done. The hospital does pay for Lifeline service though. This is a direct line through your phone accessed via a panic button on a wrist bracelet. Plus, there's an on-call home dialysis nurse.

Pierre