Nephrology

Blood Purification Techniques

When kidney function decreases to a critical level or complications arise, a person may need to start dialysis. Dialysis allows people with kidney failure a chance to live productive lives. Dialysis is a treatment where the purification and filtration is done by the machines. This helps the body to maintain balance when the kidneys losses their function. When the kidney losses their major function that is removal of excess salt and other waste product from the blood which could be toxic to the body, the same would be imitated in artificial form and that’s known as dialysis.

Under dialysis there are two methods; “Hemodialysis” is one of the common types of dialysis in which doctors use artificial kidney to filter the blood and which will be done outside the body. Patient’s blood is drawn out through vascular access, filtered and again put it back to the patient.  There are two types of vascular access for long term dialysis and are arterivenous fistula (AV-fistula) which connects an artery and a vein and an AV graft and for short term treatment catheter is inserted in the large vein present in the neck of the patients.  Another type of dialysis known as “peritoneal dialysis” in which surgically implanted catheter located in the belly region will assists in the purification of blood. The catheter will contain special fluid in the abdomen which will purify the blood and removes waste from the blood