Prevalence of dyslipidemic risk factors in hemodialysis and CAPD patients

Abstract

Background: Dyslipidemic 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.

Methods: We used the recently published recommendations of the Medical Experts Group concerning cardiovascular risk factors for the categorization of dyslipidemic factors. These were total cholesterol>200 mg/dL, low-density lipoprotein (LDL) cholesterol>100 mg/dL, high-density lipoprotein (HDL) cholesterol <40 mg/dL, triglycerides>180 mg/dL, and Lp(a)>30 mg/dL.

Results: CAPD 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).

Conclusions: Dyslipidemic 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.