ST. JOHN'S, NEWFOUNDLAND—Patients on peritoneal dialysis (PD) are at 51 percent higher risk of being hospitalized for infections than those receiving hemodialysis (HD), according to findings presented at the Canadian Society of Nephrology annual meeting.
“Higher risk of infection-related hospitalization among peritoneal dialysis patients is mostly explained by dialysis-related infections, which are for the most part peritonitis,” said primary investigator Jean-Philippe Lafrance, MD, of the University of Montreal. “This risk doesn't appear to be balanced by vascular-access-related infections among hemodialysis patients.”
He and his colleagues analyzed data from the Quebec health care insurance plan, Quebec hospital discharge summary databases, and the Canadian Organ Replacement Register. They analyzed information on all adults (except those who had already had a kidney transplant or fewer than three months' of follow-up data) with information in all three sets of databases who initiated chronic dialysis between January 2001 and December 2007. They investigators compared the characteristics of 915 PD patients in the resultant cohort of 5,858 patients to 915 matched HD patients.
