2019 Volume 26 Issue 6 Pages 423-429
In the fields of emergency medicine and intensive care medicine, acute blood purification therapy has been applied not only as renal replacement therapy, but also for cytokine removal and mediator modulation to improve the outcome in critically ill patients. Continuous blood purification (CBP) therapy is the most frequently performed modality in acute blood purification therapy, and hemofilters are an essential device for CBP. The treatment mode selection and settings of CBP are important to improve the patients’ condition and treatment efficiency. In particular, hemofilter selection is a key in CBP settings. Currently, there are many commercially available hemofilters, and each hemofilter has a unique design to sustain solute removal and anti-coagulation ability for long-term use. Furthermore, differences in the membrane material account for differences in the solute removal, filtration, and cytokine adsorption abilities. In clinical practice, hemofilters must be selected based on the characteristics of each membrane material. In this report, we describe our attempt to classify and evaluate the membrane performances for solute removal, filtration, cytokine adsorption ability and hemofilter life-time based on the membrane material and discuss future perspectives of acute blood purification therapy.
