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Tuesday, November 29, 2011

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B.S.

Hi (Most US Dialysis Patients Participate in Regular Exercise)(Overall, 47.4% of participants were categorized as regular exercisers.)
When does 47.4% equals MOST? Its not even Half.
I work in a major dialysis company and oversee several dialysis clinics in a large urban city. I dont need a study to just look at all the patients in this area and I can through out a % to. MOST 90% of patients in this area Dont exercise. I am not sure where this survey is from or area it was done, but the patients did not tell the truth.

Peter Laird, MD

Sir, I would suggest that you go back and read through the abstract more closely. 47.4% of all patients in this international study participated in exercise. That was the entire study cohort from several nations. If you download the PowerPoint Slides that accompany the abstract, you will see the breakdown of exercise and frequency by individual nations in the study. Italy has a much better overall mortality rate than the US, but very low exercise participation.

The US has very high mortality but according to this well done DOPPS survey, it ranks high among the nations that have patients that exercise and are on dialysis. The total amount is about 55% of US patients.

I am sorry to hear that 90% of your patients do not exercise. Perhaps your dialysis unit should consider the fact that places your unit in one of the lowest percentiles for exercise and begin to address what sounds like a major problem that should be corrected. Instead, it sounds as if you blaming the patients themselves. If you read through the DOPPS report, they noted that dialysis units that offered patients exercise programs outside of the unit or during dialysis had a much higher percentage of patients that did exercise. You may wish to review the entire study and discuss this with your team to see how you can improve such a low level of participation in exercise.

Bill Peckham

I presented this DOPPS data at KidneyWeek, it also showed that if a unit had an exercise program dialyzors were significantly more likely to exercise. The unfortunate unit where BS works could improve people's lives by doing a better job.

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