Abstract
Fever is one of the well known phenomena complicating chronic hemodialysis (HD) therapy. Although dialysis membranes are generally considered to be impermeable to bacterial endotoxin (ET) contaminated in dialysates used for HD therapy since ET molecular weight in aqueous media have been reported to exceed 106 dalton, fever developing in patients during hemodialysis has been suggested to be associated with bacterial contamination in the dialysate. However, there are few reports concerning its molecular weight in such dialysates.
We have already reported a newly developed polyacrylamide gel electrophoresis with sodium deoxycholate (DOC-PAGE) which provides the ET molecular weight. Using this method, therefore, we attempted to determine the molecular weight of ET in dialysates. We demonstrated that ET in dialysates were of roughly two different types with DOC-PAGE and that, as compared to migration profiles of Salmonella ET as controls on DOC-PAGE, one molecular weight of ET was approximately 4, 000 while the other was tens of thousands. This investigation indicates the possibility of ET transfer across dialysis membranes.
