While-you-sleep dialysis helps kidney patients

Kidney patients can improve their health by undergoing dialysis at home as they sleep, according to researchers in Toronto.

A dialysis machine works like an artificial kidney. It cleans the blood and removes waste and excess water.

But patients spend much of their lives strapped to the machine in a hospital. That can prevent them from working full time. For Yvonne Maffei of Maple, Ont., dialysis kept her alive, but robbed her of lifestyle.

Maffei said it was a difficult transition to go from working fulltime for five years in a dental office to not working at all and not being able to help her husband.

Maffei is one of 150 patients worldwide who has been trained to do nocturnal dialysis at home. Her blood is cleaned while she sleeps. She said "it's like being normal again."

Kidney specialist Dr. Christopher Chan of Toronto General Hospital led a study on night time dialysis which appears in the June issue of Kidney International.

Chan and his colleagues compared the health of 28 patients on nocturnal home dialysis to 13 patients on hospital-based dialysis.

Improvements in heart thickening

The two groups were similar in age, blood pressure and the number of medications taken for high blood pressure when the study began.

High blood pressure and the accumulation of kidney toxins can cause people on dialysis to have an abnormally thickened heart, which can't pump blood efficiently.

Chan found nocturnal dialysis could reverse heart thickening in 71 per cent of the nocturnal dialysis patients, compared to 31 per cent of the conventional dialysis group. Nocturnal dialysis also helped with blood pressure problems.

Researchers believe dialysis works better when it's done overnight, which can't be achieved in a hospital.

Janet Bick of the Kidney Foundation in Toronto said she thinks health ministers are looking at the evidence that the nocturnal procedure improves outcomes and if it should be funded regularly.