Life Expectancy

Having paramedics show up at dialysis today and wondering about kidney transplant failure has me thinking about life expectancy on dialysis. I found this chart while Googling online:

I believe the data is from Malaysia and is at least 12 years old. However, the trends are disturbing. For people between 40-55, it looks like 11.14 years is the life expectancy on hemodialysis. Interestingly, it’s much shorter on CAPD or peritoneal dialysis using a cycler, exactly what I was doing prior to surgery. The life expectancy for CAPD and diabetes is only 3.87 years. I’m not sure how that if you look at age groups but it feels like the wait time for a kidney is longer than the expected life expectancy. Maybe it was good that CAPD wasn’t working for me since statistically I would be dead waiting for a kidney transplant.

Here is another article that has some not so encouraging data.

According to researchers, 60.3% of patients undergoing in-center dialysis in the U.S. died within 5 years, 19% died within 5 to 10 years and 20.7% lived more than 10 years.

Finally, in a previous post I was worried about having my hypothetical transplanted kidney fail in 15 years and looking at dialysis at age 66. Well, this says I’ll probably die if I go on dialysis again so problem solved.

For the study, researchers looked at 391 Medicare patients, aged 65 and older, who started dialysis, in which a machine is used to remove toxins from the blood.

Nearly 23% of the patients died within a month of starting dialysis; nearly 45% died within six months; and nearly 55% died within a year, the investigators found.