Non-invasive monitoring of effective dialysis dose delivered to the haemodialysis patient.

Assessment of normalized dialysis dose Kt/V actually delivered to the patient carries the drawback of requiring several blood or dialysate samplings and urea concentration measurements. In order to easily quantify Kt/V, we validate here the routine implementation of an original technique for the non-invasive, on-line, and fully automatic estimation of total mean urea clearance. This estimation is obtained from the measurement by a conductivity method of the effective ionic dialysance DR, which is the dialysance of electrolytes taking into account ultrafiltration and recirculation. The observed increase in DR with ultrafiltration rate and decrease in DR with elevation of access recirculation ratio show that the estimation of DR is affected by ultrafiltration and recirculation in a consistent manner. The mean value Keff of ionic dialysance DR was compared with the value Kdc of effective urea clearance obtained by dialysate collection during 12 haemodialysis sessions. The similarity (magnitude of variation 5%) between the ionic dialysance Keff and the effective urea clearance Kdc supports the validity of the equivalence between the transfer characteristics of electrolytes and urea through the dialyser membrane. Given an estimate of the urea distribution volume V, this estimation of effective urea clearance by ionic dialysance measurement allows an on-line estimation of the normalized dialysis dose Kt/V actually delivered to the patient.