Patients on dialysis who are severely fatigued have twice the risk of cardiovascular events
MONDAY, March 8 (HealthDay News) -- Fatigue may predict cardiovascular events in patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) utilizing hemodialysis, according to research published online March 3 in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology.
Hidenori Koyama, M.D., of the Osaka City University Graduate School of Medicine in Japan, and colleagues analyzed data from 788 patients with ESRD utilizing hemodialysis. Subjects answered a 64-item questionnaire about fatigue-related issues and were followed for a median 26 months for fatal or nonfatal cardiovascular events.
The researchers found that patients with the highest fatigue scores had a higher risk for cardiovascular events (hazard ratio, 2.17). This finding was independent of factors such as age, diabetes, history of cardiovascular disease, and markers of malnutrition and inflammation.
"There are many steps forward to be clarified. Can our novel fatigue score predict cardiovascular events in the general population or other patients with disease? Can a quantitative marker for fatigue be a good biomarker to predict cardiovascular events? Can improvement of fatigue lead to decreased morbidity? All of these steps are crucial to highlighting the significance of fatigue as an important piece of risk predictors for cardiovascular disease in patients with ESRD," the authors write.
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