Impact of assistance on peritonitis due to breach in aseptic procedure in diabetic patients: A cohort study with the RDPLF data

Background Diabetic patients often have physical impairment that could lead to manipulation errors in peritoneal dialysis (PD) and touch contamination. Nurse assistance in diabetic PD patients is known to help prevent peritonitis. We made the hypothesis that this lower risk of peritonitis was observed thanks to prevention of breach in aseptic procedure. We evaluated the impact of nurse-assisted PD on specific causes of peritonitis, especially on peritonitis due to a breach in aseptic procedure. Methods This was a retrospective observational study of the data from the French Language Peritoneal Dialysis Registry. All diabetic patients older than age 18 years starting PD in France between 1 January 2012 and 31 December 2015 were included in the study. The event of interest was the first peritonitis event due to a breach in aseptic procedure. Death, kidney transplantation and peritonitis due to another mechanism were considered as competing events. We examined the association of the covariates with all the possible outcomes using a subdistribution hazard model developed for survival analysis in the presence of competing risks. Results Four thousand one hundred one diabetic patients incident in PD were included in the study. At least one peritonitis event occurred in 1611 patients over the study period. A breach in aseptic procedure was reported in 441/1611 cases (27.3%): 209/575 (36.3%) in the self-care PD group, 56/217 (25.8%) in the family-assisted PD group and 176/819 (21.5%) in the nurse-assisted PD group. Both nurse and family assistance were associated with a lower risk of peritonitis due to breach in aseptic procedure in bivariate analysis. After adjustment on age, modified Charlson index, sex and diabetic nephropathy, patients treated by nurse-assisted PD (subdistribution hazard ratio (sd-HR) 0.52, 95% confidence interval (CI) 0.40-0.67) and those treated by family-assisted PD (sd-HR 0.70, 95% CI 0.51-0.95) had a lower likelihood of peritonitis due to a connection error compared to self-care PD in multivariate analysis. The modality of assistance was not associated with other causes of peritonitis in the multivariate analysis. Conclusion While both nurse-assisted PD and family-assisted PD were associated with lower risk of peritonitis due to a breach in aseptic procedure compared to self-care PD in our study, the protective effect was greater with nurse assistance.