How Long Can I Live With End Stage Kidney Disease After Dialysis

For end stage kidney disease patients, dialysis is one important renal replacement therapy to prolong their life expectancy, but patients still worry how long they can live since their kidney functions are less than 15% and some are even lower than 5% and they still have a lot of symptoms and discomforts even with dialysis.

Generally speaking, end stage kidney disease patients can live another 3-5 years with renal dialysis. Of cause, this can not be applied to every patient. For example, if the patient at the same time has diabetes, the annual mortality rate will be increased to 25%; if the patient has congestive heart failure, the annual mortality rate will be increased to 30%-35%.

So we can see that the exact life expectancy needs to taken into account of a variety of factors including the patient’s specific illness and physical conditions, concurrent diseases as well as what kind of treatment he or she receives. If the patients can receive timely and proper treatments and their kidney functions can be improved or at least further decline of renal functions can be prevented, ESRD patients still have great chance to further improve their life quality and life expectancy. And they can gradually reduce the frequency of dialysis so as to reduce side effects of dialysis.

The key point is how to prevent further decline of residual kidney functions and improve kidney functions. Loss of kidney functions is due to renal parenchymal and vascular impairments, therefore effective treatments should repair damaged renal tissues by cleansing the kidneys and providing necessary nutritions. In this regard, Micro-Chinese medicines therapy is a good choice. It has the functions of vasodilation, anti-inflammation, anti-coagulation, anti-bacterial so as to eliminate pathogenic factors and provide enough blood, oxygen, vitamins, amino acids and trace elements for repairing damaged renal functional tissues.

The number one cause of death for end stage renal disease patients are heart failure, therefore patients should pay more attention to the early signs of cardiovascular diseases so as to have timely prevention and treatments and greatly lower the risk of death for ESRD patients.

The last but not least are the various complications caused by dialysis. Work with the doctors to design a suitable dialysis plan and have constant adjustment according to the patients’ illness changes so as to improve the efficacy of dialysis and reduce its side effects.