SAN DIEGO — Patients with diabetic nephropathy have a slightly lower mean level of hemoglobin in the year leading up to the start of renal dialysis, compared with patients who have nondiabetic renal disease, results of a large analysis showed.
The difference persisted after adjustment for several other variables including age, gender, ethnicity, and estimated glomerular filtration rate, Dr. Daniel Ford said in an interview during a poster session at the annual meeting of the American Society of Nephrology.
“This reiterates what we know about patients with diabetic nephropathy—that they do have a tendency to have more anemia than patients with nondiabetic renal diseases,” said Dr. Ford, of the United Kingdom Renal Registry, Bristol, England. “I suspect it's because patients with diabetic nephropathy have a higher incidence of concurrent diseases, which would make it more likely that they would suffer with more anemia than patients without diabetic renal diseases. However, we did not collect data on concurrent diseases, so we weren't able to adjust for that.”
Dr. Ford and his associates evaluated the records of 1,823 patients from the U.K. Renal Registry who underwent renal dialysis between 2001 and 2006. They extracted data at time points 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 12 months before dialysis and used a quadratic multilevel model to estimate the average pattern of decline in hemoglobin.
The median age of patients was 66 years. Patients with diabetic nephropathy had slightly lower mean hemoglobin levels prior to undergoing dialysis, compared with those who had nondiabetic renal disease (10.8 vs. 11.0 g/dL, respectively). “It's a small difference, but it's statistically significant,” Dr. Ford said.
Disclosures: Dr. Ford had no relevant financial conflicts to disclose.
'It's a small difference, but it's statistically significant.'
Source Dr. Ford