Relief for kidney patients

Press, 28 January 1988, Page 13

Relief for kidney patients

Research being undertaken in Britain should lead to a much healthier life for many kidney patients undergoing regular dialysis, writes David Welsh, science correspondent for the London Press Service. Large-scale clinical trials within the next few months will involve several hundred patients throughout Britain. They will receive a treatment developed at Hammersmith Hospital, London, in conjunction with United States scientists, to correct the anaemia which patients on long-term dialysis commonly experience. One of the biggest complications, which can lead to yet more severe illness, results from the lack of a natural hormone normally produced by healthy kidneys. Known as erythropoietin (EPO), it signals the bone marrow’ to produce red blood cells, correcting anaemia. According to Dr Tony Wing, a renal consultant at St Thomas’s Hospital, London, and director of the European Dialysis and Transplant Association which will co-ordinate the British trials, scientists can now clone the gene which creates the EPO hormone and produce it in the laboratory. Given intravenously after each dialysis session, it can enable the correct haemoglobin level to be maintained, greatly improving the wellbeing of the patient. Dr Wing says that when the natural production of EPO is disrupted because of kidney damage, patients suffer from anaemia to a varying degree with symptoms including tiredness, lethargy, breathlessness and possibly angina. These could become so severe that about 10 per cent of haemodialysis patients at present need regular blood transfusions to restore their condition. The forthcoming trials will enable doctors to determine whether the artificially-pro-duced EPO should be given to all dialysis patients — and allow dose levels and administering methods to be evaluated, to avoid possible problems of hypertension and other sideeffects.