Recent advances in pediatric dialysis: a review of selected articles

Important discoveries and studies that help inform us about the best methods to evaluate and manage children with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) continue to emerge. This review addresses a number of recent publications regarding important clinical issues for children with ESRD. Despite advances made in previous years, many clinical problems remain in the care of the pediatric dialysis patient. This review covers five topics of recent interest: three articles that address important patient outcome measures such as dialysis adequacy and hemoglobin; two articles that address growth failure in a chronic dialysis patients; five articles that address cardiovascular (CV) morbidity, mortality, and interventions to reduce CV risk in children; two articles that address mineral-bone disorder (MBD) and evidence that past strategies for MBD in children may have increased CV disease; and two articles that address nephrogenic systemic fibrosis, a recently described disorder in chronic kidney disease (CKD) patients that occurs in children as well as adults. Using a concise consistent format, each of the 14 key publications is summarized, and the “conclusion” for the practitioner is identified. The goal of this review is to highlight important work done in this area and focus attention on the important issues raised by each article.