Want to improve your survival chances if you’re an end-stage renal disease patient on dialysis? Make sure you’re getting your vitamin D injections. Usually only dialysis patients with hyperparathyroidism get vitamin D, but a recent Massachusetts General Hospital study indicates that everyone on dialysis can benefit and should be getting it.
Here’s the money quote that makes you wonder just what these folks have been studying:
“We’ve been administering vitamin D injections for decades, but the potential benefit on survival has never been studied,” says Ravi Thadhani, MD, MPH, director of clinical research in MGH Nephrology.
With a 20 percent annual mortality rate, you’d think mortality issues would be a hot study topic. Apparently not so much.
Dialysis patients can’t process dietary vitamin D and must receive activated vitamin D, although only 50 percent of dialysis patients are currently treated with activated vitamin D. In 2003, the same study group found that patients receiving paricalcitol (Zemplar is the most common trade name) enjoyed better survival rates than patients receiving calcitriol.
The study included more than 50,000 patients and found that “76 percent of those receiving any form of activated vitamin D were still alive, compared with 59 percent of those not receiving the therapy.”
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