Survival analysis of pediatric dialysis patients in Taiwan.

Aim: The long-term survival of Taiwanese children with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) has not been reported before. This study aimed to determine the long-term survival, mortality hazards and causes of death in paediatric patients receiving dialysis.
Methods: Paediatric patients (aged 19 years and younger) with incident ESRD who were reported to the Taiwan Renal Registry from 1995 to 2004 were included. A total of 319 haemodialysis (HD) and 156 peritoneal dialysis (PD) patients formed the database. After stratification by dialysis modality, multivariate Cox proportional-hazards model was constructed with age, sex and co-morbidity as predictive variables.
Results: The annual paediatric ESRD incidence rate was 8.12 per million of age-related populations. The overall 1-, 5-, and 10-year survival rates for PD patients were 98.1%, 88.0% and 68.4%, respectively, and were 96.9%, 87.3% and 78.5% for HD patients. The survival analysis showed no significant difference between HD and PD (P = 0.4878). Using '15-19 years' as a reference group, the relative risk (RR) of the youngest group (0-4 years) was 6.60 (95% CI: 2.50-17.38) for HD, and 5.03 (95% CI: 1.23-20.67) for PD. The death rate was 24.66 per 1000 dialysis patient-years. The three major causes of death were infection (23.4%), cardiovascular disease (13.0%) and cerebrovascular disease (10.4%). Hemorrhagic stroke (87.5%) was the main type of foetal cerebrovascular accident.
Conclusion: We conclude that there was no significant difference of paediatric ESRD patient survival between HD and PD treatment in Taiwan. The older paediatric ESRD patients had better survival than younger patients.
(© 2012 The Authors. Nephrology © 2012 Asian Pacific Society of Nephrology.)