Session Speaker

New Therapy for End–Stage Renal Disease
Aamir Jalal Al Mosawi
Iraq

Background: In a series of 80 patients with CRF, 14 (16.5%) patients were treated with a new therapeutic approach consisting of acacia gum supplementation plus the traditional conservative measures, which resulted in amelioration of the uremic symptoms and lowering of blood urea levels thereby delaying the need for dialysis. In this sample of patients, the longest survival of 5 years was achieved in 2 patients, both treated initially with IPD. One of them was transplanted and the other was treated with combination of the traditional conservative measures and acacia gum supplementation.

The aim of this presentation is to discuss the available scientific evidence supporting this therapeutic approach.

Principles and concepts: The fact that a patient with CRF may remain asymptomatic and to a large extent, successful in maintaining normal body composition despite a reduction in the GFR over 80 %, suggests that there could be a possible intervention to bring back the patient to the asymptomatic state precluding the need for RRT. Furthermore, with appropriate dietary and pharmacologic management, patients with non-terminal CRF can be maintained surprisingly well and the transition from non-terminal CRF to ESRF represents a small decrement of renal function resulting in a large physiologic hurdle for the patient. The addition to these effective traditional measures, an agent enhances fecal nitrogen excretion that can possibly bridge this gap resulting from this small decrement of renal function obviating the need for RRT for some period of time.