Overnight Kidney Dialysis Possible

People who receive hemodialysis, cleansing of their blood of toxins because their kidneys can’t, spend hours at a time, usually several days a week in a dialysis unit at a local hospital or clinic.

On one hand, having the dialysis is a good thing, because it keeps them alive. On the other hand, dialysis is very difficult on the body and people often take at least a day to get over the exhaustion brought on by the treatment.

For people who are able to work or go to school, having dialysis digs into their productive time, their valuable time. So, is doing dialysis at night the answer and does it make a difference to the body if it’s done at night? “Maybe” and “yes, but in a good way,” seem to be the responses, following a study in the United Kingdom. Its results were published recently in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology (CJASN).

Some clinics in the UK were offering a night schedule of dialysis, which allowed patients to sleep through the treatment, rather than sitting in a clinic for between three and six hours at a time. These clinics set the dialysis for six hour or more sessions, overnight, three times per week.

For 10 years, researchers studied patients who underwent dialysis with the more traditional schedule and 146 night-time schedule patients.

What they found was that only one-third of the night-time scheduled patients stuck with it. For personal reasons, the remaining went back to the traditional day-time treatments. The changes weren’t done for medical reasons.

Of those who chose to stay with the night-time dialysis, the results found that in some ways, they did better than their day-scheduled peers. They (the night-timers) had less urea in their blood, which is what is being removed through the dialysis, and they were less likely to be anemic. What is interesting is that these findings add to earlier studies that found overnight dialysis lowered blood pressure, as well as what doctors call premature death.

In addition to the ability to keep a lifestyle a little more “normal,” night-time dialysis would free up spots for others during the week, perhaps making it easier to schedule patients for their treatments.

Of course, there are likely to be drawbacks. Night-time stays could play havoc with home life or touch on other issues. But, if the option is there, this could be a good solution for many people.

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