© The Author [2007]. Published by Oxford University Press on behalf of ERA-EDTA. All rights reserved. for Permissions, please email: journals.permissions@oxfordjournals.org
Dialysis therapy: think differently
Service de Néphrologie et Dialyse, Centre Hospitalier de Saintes, Saintes, France
Correspondence and offprint requests to: Bruno Perrone, MD, Centre Hospitalier de Saintes, F-17100 Saintes, France. Email: perrone.bruno@wanadoo.fr
Keywords: dialysis; proteomic analysis; urea Kt/V; uraemic pruritus; uraemic toxins
| The first 10% of the full text of this article appears below. |
The first successful dialysis treatment was performed, as almost every nephrologist would know, by Dr Willem Kolff in 1945.
When Dr Kolff designed the first artificial kidney, he had to determine the size of the dialysis membrane that he would be using. To solve the problem of how to effect a dialysis treatment, he took a piece of artificial sausage skin (it was cellophane material), about 40 cm in length, filled it with 25 ml of blood and added 400 mg/100 ml of urea, shook it up and down in