抄録
As of October, 1912, private charges for chronic hemodialysis and peritoneal dialysis were covered by the government, therefore, number of patients under chronic dialysis therapy have significantly increased by year and year from that time. There were 30, 000 patients on chronic dialysis treated in 1, 130 dialysis centers in Japan at the end of June, 1979. In 1 year about 7, 300 patients suffered from terminal stage of chronic renal failure were newly treated with hemodialysis or peritoneal dialysis in Japan. The survival rate of chronic hemodiaysis patients was 85% in lyear, and 70% in 5 years after begining of the treatment at the end of 1978 in Japan.
These data suggest that the final total number of chronic dialysis patients in Japan will reach approximately 130, 000. In near future, at the end of 1989, 10 years after now, number of these patients will be more 2.46 times than number of patients at present. So that, we have to set up both well-trained staffs and kidney assist machines corresponding to an increase of the patients. However, it seems impossible to prepare such large requests in short period.
As a settlement of these problems, a short time dialysis (3 hours) should be introduced in the treatment, however, an usual dialyzer functioning with dialysis can not be able to perform maintenance dialysis in only 3 hours.
A new system combining direct hemoperfusion by microencapsulated, bead-shaped charcoal and hollow fiber kidney is available to perform 3 hours maintenace dialysis as results of our clinical applications in long period.
This system is not able to cut off the dialysis time, but also having a profit of removing middle molecular weight substances from the blood during the dialysis. As a result of removing unknown substances, an uremic pericarditis and uremic nueropathy are markedly improved with this treatment.
This newly devised kidney assist system is veru usuful for the settlement of increasing patients under treatment of chronic renal failure, for rehabilitation of them and for treatment for patients under some kinds of uremic conditions.
