Major North American breakthrough for dialysi...( Montreal Canada November 27 2008 S...),Health

Montreal, Canada, November 27, 2008 Suffering from end-stage renal disease (ESRD), a growing number of patients at the Centre hospitalier de l'Universit de Montral (CHUM), have become the beneficiaries of a North American breakthrough: high efficacy hemodiafiltration (HDF).

An extracorporeal blood purification technique, HDF is indicated for ESRD patients. Since the HDF unit was introduced in CHUM's Nephrology section, preliminary results show a clear advantage of high efficacy HDF over conventional hemodialysis in several areas, including the following:

• Improved removal of uremic toxins;
• Decreased number of hospitalization days;
• A better tolerance for patients;
• Minimizes the state of chronic inflammation that too often may lead to complications over a long course of dialysis;
• Diminished need for certain medications.
• Increased biocompatibility across the blood-dialysis system interface.

"Conventional hemodialysis continues to save lives, but we now have the technology to improve the lot of dialysis patients," says Dr. Rnee Lvesque, nephologist and lead physician in the HDF program at CHUM, and a professor with the medical faculty of the Universit de Montral. "At CHUM, we're proud to soon be accepting a cohort of forty patients undergoing HDF." Dr. Lvesque added that the CHUM Nephrology section is putting much efforts behind the new process, and hopes that one day soon all dialysis patients will be treated in this fashion.

Recent retrospective clinical data indicate ¹, ² that HDF reduces the mortality rates of dialysis patients and randomized studies are under way to provide clear proof of increased survival rates for patients. Among these, the CONTRAST³ study compares hemodialysis with online hemodiafiltration HDF in overall performance relative to cardiovascular morbidity and mortality. The study seeks to recruit seven hundred test subjects
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