Aluminum removal with hemodialysis, hemofiltration and charcoal hemoperfusion in uremic patients after desferrioxamine infusion. A comparison of efficiency.

In order to compare the effectiveness of aluminum removal in uremic patients during extracorporeal treatment, 17 patients with endstage renal failure were given a desferrioxamine infusion of 40 mg/kg body weight after an ordinary dialysis treatment. Forty-eight hours later 7 patients were treated with hemodialysis, 6 with hemofiltration and 4 with a combination of hemodialysis and hemoperfusion. The clearance of aluminum was measured at different intervals. It was found that the aluminum clearance was 75 +/- 18 ml/min in hemofiltration compared to 30 +/- 10 ml/min in hemodialysis (p less than 0.001). A combination of hemodialysis and hemoperfusion with a charcoal column containing 100 g activated charcoal in series gave a total aluminum clearance of 56 +/- 11 ml/min. The total amount of aluminum in the ultrafiltrate after hemofiltration was found to be approximately 3 times as high (1,728 +/- 156 micrograms) as the total amount of aluminum in the hemodialysis water that had passed a single pass system during a 4-hour dialysis (576 +/- 104 micrograms). Our results indicate that hemofiltration or a combination of hemodialysis and hemoperfusion should be used to remove aluminum in patients with signs of severe aluminum accumulation such as encephalopathy or painful bone disease, because these methods are 2-3 times as effective as ordinary hemodialysis. In patients where aluminum has been accumulated but no severe symptoms occur hemodialysis gives a significant clearance of the aluminum desferrioxamine complex.