Nutritional Effect of Dialysis Therapy

The prognosis of patients with end‐stage renal disease has been improved by the recent remarkable advances in medical and engineering technology. However, there are still many unsolved problems in the clinical field. One of the problems is an intractable malnutrition characterized by clinical manifestations including hypoproteinemia and decrease in muscular volume, which is associated with deterioration in the quality of the patient's life. Malnutrition in hemodialysis patients involves abnormal energy metabolism and aberrant amino acid metabolism. In the most malnourished patients, immunodefense mechanisms and homeostasis are disrupted, greatly influencing the prognosis. Moreover, when the performance of dialyzer used is too high, the dialysis treatment might remove a necessary nutrient for the patient. There is also a possibility that the protein catabolism is accelerated when the biocompatibility is inferior. On the other hand, in malnutri‐tion, the circulating level of insulin‐like growth factor‐1 (IGF‐1) falls while the level of insulin‐like growth factor binding protein‐1 (IGFBP‐1) is remarkably increased. It has been recognized that IGF‐1 and IGFBP‐1 are indicators reflecting the initiation of a malnutritional state in patients with chronic renal failure, although there are many indicators such as albumin, prealbumin, and anthropometric measurement for nutritional assessment. We have suggested that r‐hGH and IGF‐1 improve the malnutritional state by alleviating hypoproteinemia and abnormality of serum amino acid profile in uremic patients on hemodialysis. The serum IGF‐1/IGFBP‐1 ratio is useful not only as a nutritional parameter but also as a predicting index of responsiveness to r‐hGH. It is necessary to examine the problem from various angles to improve malnutrition in the dialysis patient, while considering the above mentioned.