Peer-review started: September 26, 2018
First decision: October 15, 2018
Revised: November 5, 2018
Accepted: January 9, 2019
Article in press: January 9, 2019
Published online: January 21, 2019
The population of patients with end stage renal disease (ESRD) is increasing, lengthening waiting lists for kidney transplantation. Majority of the patients are not able to receive a kidney transplant in timely manner even though it is well established that patient survival and quality of life after kidney transplantation is far better when compared to being on dialysis. A large number of patients who desire a kidney transplant ultimately end up needing some form of dialysis therapy. Most of incident ESRD patients choose hemodialysis (HD) over peritoneal dialysis (PD) as the modality of choice in the United States, even though studies have favored PD as a better choice of pre-transplant dialysis modality than HD. PD is largely underutilized in the United States due to variety of reasons. As a part of the decision making process, patients are often educated how the choice regarding modality of dialysis would fit into their life but it is not clear and not usually discussed, how it can affect eventual kidney transplantation in the future. In this article we would like to discuss ESRD demographics and outcomes, modality of dialysis and kidney transplant related events. We have summarized the data comparing PD and HD as the modality of dialysis and its impact on allograft and recipient outcomes after kidney transplantation.
Core tip: Patients with end stage renal failure need some form of dialysis therapy as a bridge while they wait for kidney transplantation. In this paper we discuss if dialysis modality pre transplantation has any impact on transplant related outcomes.