Abstract
A nationwide survey of 4,367 dialysis facilities was conducted at the end of 2014, among which 4,330 (99.2%) responded. The number of new dialysis patients was 38,327 in 2014. Since 2008, the number of new dialysis patients has remained almost the same without any marked increase or decrease. The number of dialysis patients who died in 2014 was 30,707. The dialysis patient population has been increasing yearly in Japan ; it was 320,448 at the end of 2014. The number of dialysis patients per million at the end of 2014 was 2,517. The crude death rate of dialysis patients in 2014 was 9.6%. The mean age of new dialysis patients was 69.04 years and the mean age of the entire dialysis patient population was 67.54 years. The most common primary cause of renal failure among new dialysis patients was diabetic nephropathy (43.5%). The actual number of new dialysis patients with diabetic nephropathy has remained nearly unchanged for the last few years. Diabetic nephropathy was also the most common causal primary disease among the entire dialysis patient population (38.1%), followed by chronic glomerulonephritis (31.3%). The percentage of dialysis patients with diabetic nephropathy has been increasing continuously, whereas the percentage of dialysis patients with chronic glomerulonephritis has been decreasing. The number of patients who underwent hemodiafiltration (HDF) at the end of 2014 was 43,283, a marked increase from that in 2012. This number is approximately twice the number at the end of 2012. In particular, the number of patients who underwent online HDF increased more than 2.5 times over the last three years. The facility survey showed that 9,255 patients underwent peritoneal dialysis (PD) in 2014. Among them, 1,913 patients also underwent another dialysis method using extracorporeal circulation, such as hemodialysis (HD) or HDF. The number of patients who underwent HD at home at the end of 2014 was 529, a continued increase from that at the end of 2013 (461).
