Dialysis vs Conservative Management for Older Adults: Manju Kurella Tamura, Susan Wong, & Maria Montez-Rath

We recently published a podcast on palliative care for kidney failure, focusing on conservative kidney management. Today we’re going to focus upstream on the decision to initiate dialysis vs conservative kidney management.

As background, we discuss Manju Kurella Tamura’s landmark NEJM paper that found, contrary to expectations, that function declines precipitously for nursing home residents who initiate dialysis.  If the purpose of initiating dialysis is improving function - our complex, frail, older patients are likely to be disappointed.

We also briefly mention Susan Wong’s terrific studies that found a disconnect between older adults with renal failure’s expressed values, focused on comfort, and their advance care planning and end-of-life care received, which focused on life extension; and another study that found quality of life was sustained until late in the illness course.

One final briefly mentioned piece of background: John Oliver’s hilarious and disturbing takedown of the for profit dialysis industry, focused on DaVita.

And the main topic of today is a paper in Annals of Internal Medicine, Maria first author, that addressed the tradeoffs between initiating dialysis vs continued medical/supportive management.   Turns out, in summary people who initiate dialysis have mildly longer lives, but spend more time in facilities, away from home.  We also discuss (without trying to get too wonky!) immortal time bias and target emulation trials. Do target trials differ from randomized trials and “ordinary” observational studies, or do they differ?!? Eric is skeptical.

Bottom line: if faced with the decision to initiate dialysis, waiting is generally better.  Let it be (hint hint).

-Additional link to study with heatmaps of specific locations (hospital, nursing home, home) after initiating dialysis.

-@AlexSmithMD