Can we improve the quality of life for dialysis patients?

摘要

Quality of life (QoL), an individual's perception of his or her life and sense of well-being in relation to his or her goals, expectations, standards, and concerns,1 may be profoundly altered by chronic disease. A recent prospective evaluation of health-related QoL (HRQoL) in a cohort of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) showed decreasing scores with advancing CKD.2 Several studies of dialysis patients have shown that measures of HRQoL and depression are correlated with mortality and hospitaliza-tion.3"6 For many dialysis patients, the quality of their lives is more important than hospitalization or mortality rates. Do our treatments with dialysis machines, medications, diet, and lifestyle counseling improve our patients' QoL? To answer this question, we need reliable tools to measure QoL and interventional studies to examine the effect of our treatments on these important outcomes.