14 DAY TRIAL // Kidney disease patients on dialysis need social and family support in order to stick to the doctor's orders and take care of their health, a new study conducted by the University of Bordeaux and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Bordeaux, concluded.
It is rather hard to suffer from kidney disease and to have to go every day to dialysis, so patients often tend to be stressed because usually their treatment is taking them away from their families.
And as in many cases, in order to stop feeling guilty about being ill, the patients will simply stop asking for help and start to ignore their treatment, social support from family and friends is necessary to put them back on track.
What Aurélie Untas (Université de Bordeaux, in Bordeaux, France), Christian Combe, MD, PhD (Université de Bordeaux and the Centre Hospitalier Universitaire de Bordeaux), and colleagues analyzed in their study was what happens to dialysis patients if they do not get this support.
They analyzed the records of 32,332 dialysis patients enrolled in the Dialysis Outcomes and Practice Patterns Study (DOPPS), carried out between 1996 and 2008.
DOPPS is a prospective study of adult dialysis patients that are selected out of 930 dialysis facilities in 12 countries, worldwide.
The participants answered questions about their social activities, about the way they felt – isolated or a burden for everyone else, and also about the type of support they received from family and dialysis staff.
People who felt that their disease had interfered with their social life, had left them isolated or turned them into a burden for their families, were more likely to die during the study period.
Also, they were more likely to stop following their doctors' orders, maintaining dialysis and develop a poor physical quality of life.
What surprised the researchers was the fact that the support and the encouragements of the medical staff did not help patients at all.
They also noticed some differences depending on the country, like for example in Japan, patients who were not happy about their family support were more likely to die during the study.
Dr Combe said that “the presence of supportive people who can participate in care is an important source of strength for patients faced with hemodialysis.
“These study results raise the possibility that social-support interventions may improve patient care.
“Such interventions could strengthen other psychosocial factors, improve survival and enhance quality of life.”
The study appears in an upcoming issue of the Clinical Journal of the American Society Nephrology (CJASN).