Rapid growth in the use of automated peritoneal dialysis (APD) in adult patients on peritoneal dialysis.

: Inadequate dialysis dose is associated with poor patient-survival in peritoneal dialysis (PD). Most patients would require more than four exchanges a day after losing residual renal function. The use of automated peritoneal dialysis (APD) seems to be a practical way to provide extra dialysis for these patients. In our Dialysis Centre in Northern Alberta, we started to use APD for our adult patients only from 1993. When we evaluated our practice recently, we found that we are progressively increasing the use of APD (including cyclers and night exchange devices) from 3% to 21% for our total adult PD patients in the last 3 years. This increase in the use of APD is mostly to accommodate PD prescription changes and not changes in lifestyle. Increase in the use of APD was associated with decrease in the rate of our PD dropout to hemodialysis. We conclude that to maintain adequate dialysis, rapid growth of APD will become common in North American PD centers in the future and will reduce transfer to hemodialysis.