The assessment of pulmonary congestion in maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients is challenging. Bioelectrical impedance analysis (BIA) can estimate body water compartments. Natriuretic peptides are markers of hemodynamic stress, neurohormonal activation and extracellular volume overload. Lung ultrasound (LUS) has been proposed for the non-invasive estimation of extravascular lung water throug...

Carpal tunnel syndrome (CTS) is the most common mononeuropathy in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD). The association between chronic inflammation and CTS in hemodialysis (HD) patients has rarely been investigated. HD patients with a high normalized protein catabolic rate (nPCR) and low serum albumin level likely have adequate nutrition and inflammation. In this study, we assume that ...

BACKGROUND This study was to investigate the relationship among aortic artery calcification (AAC), cardiac valve calcification (CVC), and mortality in maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients. METHODS All MHD patients in Shanghai Ruijin Hospital in July 2011 were included. To follow up for 42 months, clinical data, predialysis blood tests, echocardiography, and lateral lumbar X-ray plain radio...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) patients often have protein-energy wasting, poor health-related quality of life (QoL), and high premature death rates, whereas African-American MHD patients have greater survival than non-African-American patients. We hypothesized that poor QoL scores and their nutritional correlates have a bearing on racial survival disparities of MHD pa...

BACKGROUND The accurate assessment of body fluid volume is important in many clinical situations. Hannan et al. proposed a single-frequency bioimpedance equation (HE) to calculate extracellular water (ECW) and total body water (TBW). There are two equations based on the bioimpedance spectroscopy (BIS) method for the evaluation of body fluid volume: Xitron equations (XE) and body composition spe...

OBJECTIVE This study was planned to evaluate the effect of short term intravenous ascorbic acid on reducing ferritin and erythropoietin resistance in patients of chronic kidney disease (CKD) on maintenance haemodialysis (MHD). METHODS Forty adult patients [20 patients in group A with increased serum ferritin level (>500 ng/ml), transferrin saturation (TSAT) ≤20% and 20 patients in group B wit...

BACKGROUND The National Kidney Foundation-Kidney Disease Outcomes Quality Initiative recommends that the serum aluminum level (SAL) should be below 20 µg/L for patients with maintenance hemodialysis (MHD). However, serum aluminum may have toxic effects on MHD patients even when it is in the apparently acceptable range (below 20 µg/L). METHODS The Medical Ethics Committee approved this study. ...

Patients on maintenance hemodialysis (MHD) often show substantial reductions in quality of life (QoL). The SF36 (Short Form with 36 questions), a well-documented, self-administered QoL scoring system that includes eight independent scales and two main dimensions, has been widely used and validated. In 65 adult outpatients on MHD, the SF36 and its scales and dimensions, scored as a number betwee...

BACKGROUND Infection with the human T-cell lymphotropic virus type 1 (HTLV-1), although asymptomatic in most cases, can lead to potentially grave consequences, such as adult T-cell leukemia-lymphoma and HTLV-1-associated myelopathy / tropical spastic paraparesis. Its prevalence varies widely across different populations and geographic regions. A population-based study in the city of Salvador, l...