Study of the effect of dietary counselling on the improvement of end-stage renal disease patients.

Proper nutrition may help to reverse the wasting syndrome in dialysis patients with kidney disease on dialysis. This intervention study aimed to identify malnutrition problems and assess the effect of dietary counselling on improvement of health status of end-stage renal disease patients subjected to haemodialysis. Pre-intervention data were collected from 41 patients attending El Haram dialysis centre, Giza, Egypt; 97.5% of the patients were considered mildly to moderately malnourished and multiple malnutrition problems were detected (protein-energy malnutrition, hypocalcaemia, and anaemia and hyperphosphataemia). Nutritional counselling sessions resulted in statistically significant post-intervention improvements in Karnofsky performance scale scores, malnutrition inflammation scores and nutritional knowledge of the patients. Providing one-to-one nutrition counselling could be linked to improvements in the patients' nutritional knowledge and practices and to their health status and performance in activities of daily life.