Healthy kidneys clean your blood by removing excess fluid, minerals, and wastes. They also make hormones that keep your bones strong and your blood healthy. When your kidneys fail, harmful wastes build up in your body, your blood pressure may rise, and your body may retain excess fluid and not make enough red blood cells. When this happens, you need treatment to replace the work of your failed kidneys.
Hemodialysis is the most common method used to treat advanced and permanent kidney failure. Since the 1960s, when hemodialysis first became a practical treatment for kidney failure, we’ve learned much about how to make hemodialysis treatments more effective and minimize side effects. In recent years, more compact and simpler dialysis machines have made home dialysis increasingly attractive. But even with better procedures and equipment, hemodialysis is still a complicated and inconvenient therapy, and it will not work forever. A kidney transplant is the preferrable plan.
However, end stage renal disease is a significant global health problem. and donor kidneys for transplantation are in short supply. Dialysis and filtration are the only alternative treatments.
Hope for the future rests in current research which is developing a miniaturized, implantable, and self-regulating bio-artificial kidney that takes the dialysis machinery and integrates it into a miniaturized implantable device. The successful development of this bio-artificial kidney would provide an alternative to the majority of the dialysis procedures performed annually in the U.S.
Sources
National Institute of Biomedical Imaging and Bioengineering
http://www.nibib.nih.gov/
National Institute of Diabetes and Kidney, Digestive Disorders
http://kidney.niddk.nih.gov/kudiseases/pubs/hemodialysis/index.htm
del.icio.us
Digg this
