Tzamaloukas AH, Dimitriadis A, Murata GH, Nicolopoulou N, Malhotra D, Balaskas EV, Kakavas J, et al.
Continuous peritoneal dialysis is large weight individuals
XVIth Annual CAPD Conference
Perit Dial Int Suppl 2 (Feb) 16:S31 1996

This is another paper dealing with PD in large size patients (see also the abstract by Fried et al). A number of authorities have recently proposed that patients weighing over 90-100 kg may not be suitable for PD because of the inevitable problems achieving higher solute clearance targets. The abstract by Tzamaloukas et al is thus timely in that it shows that such patients can achieve higher adequacy targets. They report that 24 patients weighing more than 100 kg were treated with APD in association with daytime exchanges and that as many of these patients achieved the acceptable creatinine clearance in KT/V targets as did patients who weighed less than 100 kg. Astonishingly, a greater proportion of patients weighing more than 100 kg had an acceptable creatinine clearance as compared to those weighing less than 100 kg. Even in anuric patients over 100 kg, targets were as likely to be achieved as in patients less than 100 kg.

Comment: Two points are pertinent. One is that the findings suggest that the physicians made a greater effort to achieve adequate prescriptions in patients who were heavy than in those who were not. The results was that, paradoxically, they did as well if not better in the heavy patients as they did in the less heavy. Secondly, the heavy patients had better small solute clearance when normalization was done to ideal rather than actual weights and body surface areas. This implies that these heavy patients were obese rather than muscular. Thus, the authors have shown that it is feasible to reach small solute adequacy targets in obese patients weighing more than 100 kg, but they have not shown that it is possible in the small proportion of patients over 100 kg who are predominantly muscular rather than obese. This is an important difference. (Peter G. Blake, M.D.)

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XVIth Annual CAPD Conference
Basic peritoneal dialysis : Chronic PD regimens, adequacy, modeling