Status of Hemodialysis of Drugs in 2002

Hemodialysis is a life-sustaining chronic therapy for individuals with end stage renal disease (ESRD). It is also frequently used for days to weeks for patients with acute renal failure who are awaiting the recovery of their kidneys from the acute toxic or traumatic event. Both populations of patients often require complex pharmacotherapeutic regimens, and it is not uncommon for them to be receiving 10 or more concomitant medications. Optimization of care for these patients is dependent on the selection of the most appropriate drug as well as dosage regimen design, which accounts for the influence of hemodialysis therapy on drug disposition. During the last 10 to 15 years there have been several significant changes in the prescribed dose of dialysis and the composition and size of dialyzers available for use. Furthermore, reuse of dialyzers, which was rare in the early 1980s, is now common; it is employed with over 70% of patients with ESRD. The new synthetic dialyzers, which are now used for over 60% of ESRD patients in the United States, are uniformly associated with dramatic improvements in drug removal; dialysis clearance increases of 3 to 10 fold were common for the few drugs evaluated. The influence of these changes in hemodialysis therapy on drug disposition are discussed in a quantitative fashion, and a conceptual framework for drug therapy regimen decision making is presented. For the majority of the drugs reviewed, however, there were no data in the literature regarding dialyzability with currently available dialyzers. The generation of dialyzability data for old and new pharmacotherapeutic agents with state of the art dialysis procedures is clearly needed.