Predicting mortality in dialysis patients based on low intact parathyroid hormone levels is difficult, because aluminum intoxication, malnutrition, older age, race, diabetes, or peritoneal dialysis may influence these levels. We investigated the clinical implications of low parathyroid hormone levels in relation to the mortality of dialysis patients using sensitive, stratified, and adjusted mod...

BACKGROUND In type II diabetic patients, a better glycaemic control has been reported to slow down the progression of nephropathy. The effect of pre-dialysis glycaemic control on the long term prognosis in type II diabetics on haemodialysis is still uncertain. The purpose of this study is to evaluate the effect of glycaemic control before starting maintenance haemodialysis on the clinical outco...

BACKGROUND Malnutrition affects 1/3 of hemodialysis patients and associates with a higher risk of morbidity and mortality. Serum albumin is a marker of nutrition and inflammation, and predicts mortality, particularly when <3.8 g/dL. This study was performed to identify risk factors for hypoalbuminemia (<3.8 g/dL) and the particular temporal relationship and strength of association between prote...

Catheter-related complications--including infection, dialysate leak, subcutaneous leak, outflowfailure, and malfunction--are the principal causes of peritoneal dialysis (PD) failure. In the present retrospective study, we evaluated the catheter-related complications that occurred in children at our facility who were started on chronic PD during the period from July 1997 to August 2004. During t...

Resampling is the process of selecting from a set candidate samples to achieve distribution (approximately) proportional desired target. Recent work has revisited its application Monte Carlo integration, yielding powerful and practical importance sampling methods. One drawback existing resampling methods that they cannot generate stratified samples. We propose two complementary techniques effic...

Clinicians caring for patients on peritoneal dialysis (PD) have relied on a variety of laboratory measures to assess the health of patients and their response to treatment. Traditionally, serum albumin has been an indicator of nutrition status and has therefore been included in monthly blood testing in most centers. The development of hypoalbuminemia in dialysis patients has been associated wit...

Pyridoxal 5•L-phosphate (PLP) is known to combine with bovine serum albumin to form a(1:1) complex which scarcely dissociates, even when subjected to intensive dialysis. When this complex was incubated with apo-aspartate aminotransferase (apoGOT) for an appropriate time and the preincubated mixture then submitted to the usual GOT assay, the appearance of GOT activity was obviously confirmed, in...