Prevalence of dyslipidemic risk factors in hemodialysis and CAPD patients

Prevalence of dyslipidemic risk factors in hemodialysis and CAPD patients.BackgroundDyslipidemic factors obviously contribute to the high cardiovascular risk in dialysis patients but are often an underestimated problem. Therefore, we determined the prevalence of dyslipidemic factors in a large group of unselected hemodialysis (N = 564) and CAPD (N = 168) patients.MethodsWe used the recently published recommendations of the Medical Experts Group concerning cardiovascular risk factors for the categorization of dyslipidemic factors. These were total cholesteroverline>200 mg/dL, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesteroverline>100 mg/dL, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol <40 mg/dL, triglycerides>180 mg/dL, and Lp(a)>30 mg/dL.ResultsCAPD patients had, in sum, a markedly worse lipid profile when compared with HD patients. They had higher frequencies of elevated total cholesterol (67% vs. 34%), triglycerides (47% vs. 28%), and Lp(a) concentrations (37% vs. 30%) when compared with HD patients. In both patient groups, about two thirds of the patients had LDL cholesterol above 100 mg/dL and HDL cholesterol below 40 mg/dL. When we analyzed the total frequency of dyslipidemic factors, we observed that the CAPD group included a markedly higher number of patients with three or four concurrent dyslipidemic factors than HD patients (P < 0.001). Furthermore, we analyzed apolipoprotein A-IV (apoA-IV), which was recently shown to be associated with cardiovascular disease, and which was about twice as high in both patient groups when compared with controls (P < 0.001).ConclusionsDyslipidemic risk factors are highly prevalent in dialysis patients, and the concomitant occurrence of several risk factors in a given patient is more often observed in CAPD than HD patients