The introduction of hemodiafiltration in the substitutive treatment of chronic renal failure has arisen from the need to find new techniques that could improve the efficiency of the traditional systems and, therefore, to treat adequately chronic uremia in the shortest possible time. 61 months of experience at our institution have shown that such a goal can be achieved, offering also practical advantages such as a better quality of life for the patients as well as the possibility to treat a greater number of them.
Hemofiltration (HF) allows a better hemodynamic tolerance than hemodialysis (HD); middle molecular weight solutes can be efficiently removed, while small solutes such as urea, creatinine and phosphate are removed to a lesser extent. By applying HD and HF simultaneously (hemodiafiltration; HDF), the benefits of both methods can be advantageously combined and the length of treatment can be reduced accordingly. This paper presents a 15-month comparative study between HF and HDF performed on 16 patients previously undergoing regular HD.
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