Since wasting and malnutrition are common problems in patients with renal failure, it is important to develop techniques for the longitudinal assessment of nutritional status. This paper reviews available methods for assessing the nutritional status; their possible limitations when applied to uremic patients are discussed. If carefully done, dietary intake can be estimated by recall interviews augmented with dietary diaries. Also, in a stable patient with chronic renal failure, the serum urea nitrogen (N)/creatinine ratio and the rate of urea N appearance reflect dietary protein intake. A comparison of N intake and urea N appearance will give an estimate of N balance. Anthropometric parameters such as the relationship between height and weight, thickness of subcutaneous skinfolds, and midarm muscle circumference are simple methods for evaluating body composition. Other methods for assessing body composition, such as densitometry and total body potassium, may not be readily applicable in patients with renal failure. More traditional biochemical estimates of nutritional status such as serum protein, albumin, transferrin, and selected serum complement determinations show that abnormalities are common among uremic patients. Certain anthropometric and biochemical measurements of nutritional status are abnormal in chronically uremic patients who appear to be particularly robust; thus, factors other than altered nutritional intake may lead to abnormal parameters in such patients. Serial monitoring of selected nutritional parameters in the same individual may improve the sensitivity of these measurements to detect changes. Standards for measuring nutritional status are needed for patients with renal failure so that realistic goals can be established optimal body nutriture.
We hypothesized that intraperitoneal air might be one of the causes of peritoneal fluid eosinophilia. To test our hypothesis, we injected 100–500 ml of sterile air intraperitoneally into 5 patients receiving continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD). All patients responded with a transient increase in peritoneal fluid nonerythrocyte cell count (peak counts ranging from 23 to 335 cells/mm3, mean peak count 140 ± 125) lasting 4 days (after injection of 100 ml of air) to 7 weeks (after injection of 500 ml of air). In 2 patients, the cells were predominantly monocytes(80 ± 6.5%), whereas in 3 patients, eosinophils predominated (63 ± 12%), while monocytes (30 ± 19%) also increased. Resolution of peritoneal fluid pleocytosis correlated temporally with absoption of subdiaphragmatic air. Our results suggest that intraperitoneal introduction of air into CAPD patients can induce peritoneal fluid eosinophilia and/or monocytosis.
Expeditious diagnosis of peritonitis remains a significant goal in the management of patients maintained on peritoneal dialysis. Several attempts to use leukocyte esterase reagent strips to diagnose peritonitis have been described. In this study we examined the usefulness of a new reagent strip, the PeriScreen Test Strip, in the diagnosis of peritonitis. A series of 72 peritoneal effluent samples obtained from 22 maintenance peritoneal dialysis patients is reported. In this study, the test strips had a sensitivity of 100% and a specificity of 98.3% as compared to an abnormal leukocyte count. Thus, in the diagnosis of peritonitis we believe that the PeriScreen Test Strip can be used as a simple bedside screening test to exclude peritonitis in peritoneal dialysis patients.
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