Diabetic Patients and Peritoneal Dialysis

Abstract

The prevalence of diabetes mellitus (DM) among patients requiring renal replacement therapy (RRT) has been on the rise worldwide, with DM now being the primary cause of end-stage renal disease (ESRD) in roughly one-third of RRT initiations. Although renal transplantation is the optimal treatment for ESRD, its limited availability has led to in-center hemodialysis (HD) being widely used as the default RRT modality in many countries. However, peritoneal dialysis (PD) may offer a superior option for diabetic patients due to its slower ultrafiltration rate, which can help mitigate the dialysis-induced hypotension and coronary ischemia that are associated with extracorporeal circulation during HD. Despite these advantages, unfounded concerns about technique failure and increased complication rates have discouraged some clinicians from recommending PD as a first-line RRT for diabetic patients. We conducted a retrospective study comparing the incidence of complications and technique survival rates between diabetic and non-diabetic patients undergoing PD at a dialysis unit in Morocco. Our findings reveal that, diabetic patients undergoing PD experienced no significant difference in technique survival or incidence of complications compared to their non-diabetics. Nevertheless, only a small proportion (17.5%) of patients in our PD unit was diabetic, suggesting a need to improve access to PD for diabetic patients with ESRD.