Mortality and Recovery of Kidney Function in Kidney Replacement TherapyRequiring AKI: Data from All Affected In-Hospital Subjects

Acute kidney injury (AKI) affects increasing numbers of hospitalized patients in Central Europe and in the US. Kidney replacement therapy (KRT) becomes mandatory if other strategies fail to prevent patients from systemic intoxication, resistant hyperhydration, or refractory hyperkalemia. The majority of data related to survival rates of AKI subjects that require KRT have been acquired under intensive care conditions. In the current letter to the editor we provide outcome data of all patients with in-hospital diagnosed AKI that received KRT at least once. We retrospectively assessed subjects receiving one or more individual sessions of KRT due to AKI of various etiology. Subjects were partly treated in the ICU or under non-ICU conditions. The in-hospital mortality was 35.4% complete recovery of kidney function occurred in 48.8%. In summary, the mortality of all inhospital AKI subjects is comparable to the mortality of AKI patients in the ICU. In addition, more than 50% do not recovery completely. Therefore, subjects with hospital-acquired AKI and an incident or prolonged need for KRT require the highest attention of nephrologists in general, no matter whether they received intensive care treatment or not.