The renal failure and hemodialysis dependent population is increasing worldwide. Hemodialysis access is the life-line of these patients. Hemodialysis access related surgical and interventional procedures form a major demand to the healthcare services in many developed and developing countries. As such, the proper clinical decision, planning and performance of these procedures will greatly benefit the hemodialysis patients and reduce unnecessary healthcare costs. This book is a practical guide for clinicians and nurses creating, treating or managing hemodialysis accesses for renal failure patients. Basic principles to manage common or difficult situations of hemodialysis access are discussed and illustrative clinical cases are shown as examples. This book is an essential reading material for healthcare professionals in their early phase of developing the hemodialysis access program, while providing useful tips and tricks to established clinicians that will broaden their armamentarium.

The renal failure and hemodialysis dependent population is increasing worldwide. Hemodialysis access is the life-line of these patients. Hemodialysis access related surgical and interventional procedures form a major demand to the healthcare services in many developed and developing countries. As such, the proper clinical decision, planning and performance of these procedures will greatly benefit the hemodialysis patients and reduce unnecessary healthcare costs. This book is a practical guide for clinicians and nurses creating, treating or managing hemodialysis accesses for renal failure patients. Basic principles to manage common or difficult situations of hemodialysis access are discussed and illustrative clinical cases are shown as examples. This book is an essential reading material for healthcare professionals in their early phase of developing the hemodialysis access program, while providing useful tips and tricks to established clinicians that will broaden their armamentarium.

This book describes the past, present and future of dialysis and dialysis-related renal replacement therapies so that the reader can acquire a firm grasp of the medical management of acute and chronic renal failure.

By becoming thoroughly conversant with the past and present of dialysis, a health care professional will be in a much better position to provide the best standard of care to patients suffering from renal failure. As the book highlights the unsolved operational obstacles in the field of renal replacement therapies, future innovators may be inspired to develop novel solutions to tackle these problems. This remarkable work is a must-read not just for health care providers in the dialysis industry, but for patients, dialysis equipment manufacturers as well as pharmaceutical companies.

This book with its most comprehensive and illuminating chapters covers all the relevant areas of hemodialysis practice including access for hemodialysis, hemodialysis modeling and membranes, timing of hemodialysis, infections in hemodialysis, the application of hemodialysis in extra-renal disease, the various formats of hemodialysis from nocturnal through SLED to apheresis and the wearable artificial kidney, convective hemodialysis methodologies, and various clinical aspects of hemodialysis including protein-calorie-malnutrition, inflammation, haemoglobin stability and sleep disorders in ESRD patients and so on. Furthermore, the inclusion of such new topics as the syndrome of rapid-onset end stage renal disease (SORO-ESRD), and the place of reduced HBV testing among ESRD patients in regions with less de novo HBV incidence to cut down on costs of delivery of hemodialysis care without loss of quality of care, are new paradigms that would play stronger roles in hemodialysis care, well into the 21st century.

In this book, the authors present topical research in the study of the indications, procedures and complications of hemodialysis. Topics discussed in this compilation include cardiovascular involvement in chronic kidney disease; nutritional therapy during hemodialysis; vascular access and common complications in patients undergoing hemodialysis treatment; prevention of hemodialysis catheter-related infections; antiplatelet medication and the risk of bleeding in hemodialysis; and vascular calcifications in end stage renal disease.

In the present book the authors introduce the utilisation of FNs in the concept of Magnetically Assisted Hemodialysis (MAHD) for the treatment of End Stage Renal Disease (ESRD). ESRD patients have to be subjected to permanent Hemodialysis (HD) therapy having a typical schedule of three 4-hour sessions per week. The proposed strategy of MAHD aims to become a more efficient development of conventional HD. The core of the idea is the production of Ferromagnetic Nanoparticles-Targeted Binding Substance Conjugates (FN-TBS Cs) constructed of biocompatible FNs and a specifically designed TBS. The TBS part is necessarily used for increasing the biocompatibility of the FNs host carriers, but most importantly should have high affinity and binding capacity for the specific Target Toxic Substance (TTS) that should be removed from the patient. For these demands to be fulfilled, antibodies or even specific proteins could serve as the TBS part of the desired FN-TBS Cs. The FN-TBS Cs should be administered to the patient timely prior to the MAHD session so that, owing to their free circulation in the vascular network, they will be able to collect the desired TTSs through their adsorption onto the TBS part of the Cs. However, long residence times of the FN-TBS Cs in the blood stream cannot be used so that noticeable triggering of the reticuloendothelial system to be avoided. As a result, the binding dynamics of the FN-TBS Cs with candidate TTSs are of major importance. Eventually, the complex FN-TBS-TTS can be selectively removed during the MAHD session by means of a "magnetic dialyser", that is an external magnetic field applied either at the conventional dialyser or at other point(s) along the extracorporeal blood circulation line of the dialysis machine. The advantages of MAHD over conventional HD are discussed in detail among issues of practical importance. Some of the main advantages are the following: (i) Increased rate of toxin removal, (ii) Selective targeting of specific TTSs and prevention by the respective disorders during early stages, (iii) Decreased duration of each dialysis session, and (iv) Adjustment of the blood flow rate to relatively lower values. Apart from these primary benefits related to the comfort and overall health status of the patient, enormous financial benefits will also evolve for National Health Budgets despite the fact that the proposed MAHD strategy requires small investments for the only modest modification of existing dialysis machines. The authors hope that the utilisation of MAHD into clinical practice will become a reality in the near future so that long-term-HD patients will benefit from all the advantages discussed here, and from many more that will probably evolve after intense {in vivo} applications are completed.