It feels weird that my post was listed at the top under "News Headlines." The ATN article came out in July and I just got around to writing about it six months later. I wrote it so that when I discuss the findings on rounds, I have a way to quickly find an abstract of the study with my personal observations. And I will discuss it with the fellows because even though the study was a negative study it is a benchmark study in nephrology. The article is a negative study but it is negative in the way that HEMO was negative, not the way that DCOR was.- HEMO is usually listed as a disappointing study because we were not able to help patients by ratcheting up their dose of dialysis from 1.16 to 1.53 (eKt/V).
But as Glen Chertow argued persuasively, the HEMO trial was a triumph of evidence based medicine. We were able to definitively argue against the desire to incrementally enhance three-times a week day-time dialysis. The increasing evidence for daily and in-center nocturnal dialysis are by-products of the failure of HEMO. If HEMO had been a positive trial we would probably be focusing on a HEMO II with a targetted eKt/V of 1.8. The negative result has sparked innovation and a search for novel ideas.
- DCOR on the other hand has almost nothing definitive to show despite being "the largest outcomes study ever done in the hemodialysis population." The failure of DCOR can be attributed to a low event rate, a high but undefined cross-over rate and a 50% drop-out rate. All of these conspired to produce an under-powered study and clinicians are left in a sea of phosphorous binder marketing without near term hope for better guidance.
A final note to the editor of RenalWEB, my bullet on the dose of dialysis referred to the HEMO trial, which did not look at frequency of dialysis or radical increases in dose. The jury is still out on those techniques but I'm with you. Those two strategies seem right and beneficial.
