Very tiny numbers of serious adverse events during home HD

Ideally, no one on dialysis will ever run into a problem. But, when the blood needs be cleaned, sometimes things can go wrong. A new study from Canada looked at life-threatening events among 500 patient years among 190 people who were doing home HD. Researchers found one death and six other serious events (most involved blood loss). In five of the events, human error was involved. They calculated an adverse event rate of 0.06 per 1000 treatments. (Editor's note: unfortunately, we don't yet have a corresponding rate for adverse events for in-center HD, but it may be far higher.)

Read the abstract » | (added 10-02-2013)