“…Although several studies have examined the association between mineral levels and the impact of achievement of K/DOQI mineral target ranges on mortality rates in HD patients [3,4,5,6,8,9,10,11,12,13,14,15,19,31,32,] only a few studies have been conducted to date on incident HD patients [33,34]. Furthermore, evidence indicates that in incident HD patients, mortality rates are higher in the early stages (first 3-4 months) of dialysis, warranting studies in this setting [35].…”