Tolerance to Hemodialysis in Insulin-Requiring Diabetic Patients: BD vs AFB With Blood Volume Biofeedback (THIRD)

• Investigate a possible better tolerance to dialysis, eliminating acetate in the dialysate bath, with AFB treatment, and using, at the same time, the automatic blood volume control (BVC). [ Time Frame: 3 months ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]

  The treatment tolerance is measured by the number of intradialytic hypotensive events, defined as:

  • systolic blood pressure less then 90 mmHg;
  • systolic blood pressure more then 25 mmHg to the predialysis value, with hypotensive events requiring therapies;
  • systolic blood pressure less then 90 mmHg with hypotensive events requiring therapies for those patients, which predialysis systolic blood pressure value was 100 mmHg.
  
  

• The secondary outcome measure is to evaluate the relative efficiency of each factor (AFB in the bath and blood volume control) to reach this result. [ Time Frame: 3 months ] [ Designated as safety issue: No ]

  The evaluation will be done on:

  • frequency of hypotensive events, during dialysis (defined as above);
  • number of nurse interventions (defined as ultrafiltration rate stop, or saline infusion);
  • antihypertensive drugs.
  
  

Acetate-Free-Biofiltration (AFB) was proved to be a technique suitable to treat critical patients, such as elders and diabetics, because of frequency reduction of hypotensive episodes and symptoms during the treatment and a better control to metabolic aspects (such as metabolic acidosis).

The Blood Volume Control (BVC) is a tool, that allows to improve the cardiovascular tolerance to the treatment, especially in hypotension-prone patients, appearing promising in the correction of the arterial hypertension induced by the hydro-saline overload.

The use of BVC in AFB has been tested to verify the behaviour of the kinetics of electrolyte (in particular of bicarbonate) and it has got good results, in terms of a further improvement in treatment tolerance, for critical patients However, this therapy (AFB+BVC) was not yet evaluated as the dialysis tolerance improvement in diabetics concern, nor the relative contribution given by each factor in achieving this result.

The study, 9 months long, is aimed to verify the treatment tolerance of insulin requiring diabetic patients, by using standard bicarbonate dialysis (BD), or Acetate Free Biofiltration (AFB) and/or a Blood Volume Control(BVC). The study is divided in three phases: the first one, three months long, is the baseline in standard bicarbonate dialysis, then all the patients are shifted to AFB with BVC, for other three months, while the last three months long phase, after a randomization, has the aim to identify the relative contribution of each factor (absence of acetate in the bath or BVC) in the treatment tolerance improvement(if any). The treatment tolerance will be evaluated considering the frequency of intradialytic hypotensive events.