Dialysis For Patients With Kidney Failure
Many patients with kidney failure need to have dialysis in their treatment. This is because kidney has lost its function of excreting wastes and toxic substances normally. As we know, kidney failure is a severe stage of kidney disease. To clear the wastes, dialysis may be recommended to patient who has more than 85% damaged kidney.
The types of dialysis
The accumulation of wastes in blood is slow, and doctor will measure the level of creatinine and urea to decide when to have dialysis, and the dialysis can be divided into hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis.
Hemodialysis uses the theory of semipermeable membrane. In the hemodialysis, patient’s blood will pass through a filter from one side, then the filtered blood will flow back to patient’s body through the other side, and the wastes will be stayed in the original side.
Peritoneal dialysis uses peritoneum as the osmotic membrane. In the peritoneal dialysis, a special fluid is flushed into patient’s peritoneal cavity. The solutes in the side which has high level of consistence will move to the low level side, and the water will move towards the opposite direction.
The side effects of dialysis
Dialysis is known as a kind of kidney replacement therapy, it can prolong the lifetime of patient, but it also has many side effects. For example, patient may has arrhythmia, which may caused by heart disease. Heart failure can appear due to dialysis, and this is one of the most serious complications of dialysis. In the process, patient often has muscle spasm, and this may relate to the shortage of oxygen and low amount of sodium. What’s more, dialysis can only excrete the toxic substances for a temporary period, and if patients excrete their metabolic wastes by dialysis in a long time, their kidneys may be absolutely damaged.
