Pilot study to assess the effects of haemodialysis treatments on blood
Research type
Research Study
Full title
Pilot study to assess the effects of haemodialysis treatments on blood flow to the ear
IRAS ID
157834
Contact name
A Davenport
Contact email
Sponsor organisation
UCL joint research office
Duration of Study in the UK
0 years, 9 months, 30 days
Research summary
More than 2 million patients with chronic kidney disease are treated by haemodialysis worldwide. Haemodialysis has been the standard treatment for patients with chronic kidney disease for more than 50 years. Although this treatment is successful in keeping patients alive; the 5 year survival is much less than that of some common cancers; including breast and colon cancer, and survival is only marginally better than that for ovarian cancer.
Although haemodialysis is considered a safe treatment, and many patients dialyse at home, or with minimal supervision, Hypotension is the commonest complication of routine outpatient haemodialysis treatments, estimated to occur in 20-40% of all treatments. Hypotension during dialysis is associated with an increased risk of both mortality, and also for the older patient increased risk of developing frailty and loss of functional status, as recurrent episodes of hypotension accelerates vascular dementia.
As such we wish develop systems to reduce and prevent hypotension during haemodialysis sessions. The first step is to monitor how blood flow changes during the haemodialysis session. The ear is used to measure central core body temperature in routine clinical practice. As such the ear acts as a window to the central circulation. The external ear contains the auditory canal and th outer surface of the ear drum, which has a number of small blood vessels. As these smaller vessels are more likely to show earlier changes in response to a reduction in plasma volume we hypothesise that monitoring changes in these blood vessels could prove to be a more reliable method of recording patient responses to the fluid shifts during dialysis.
In this pilot study we wish to take pictures of the outer ear during a dialysis session to determine whether we can detect changes in blood flow and see whether these correlate with changes in blood pressure and patient wellbeing during dialysis.REC name
North West - Preston Research Ethics Committee
REC reference
15/NW/0437
Date of REC Opinion
16 May 2015
REC opinion
Favourable Opinion