Anti-microbial catheter to cut infection risk for dialysis patients

PA84/09 Medical experts at The University of Nottingham have shown that an innovative anti-microbial catheter could vastly improve treatment and the quality of life for many community-based dialysis patients. Results of a study published in the leading journal Biomaterials, have shown that the catheter has the potential to ward off attack from a wider variety of pathogens and protect Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis (CAPD) patients from infections for up to 100 days — around 20 times longer than current catheters. CAPD offers patients with kidney failure an alternative to traditional haemodialysis, in which patients are hooked up to a dialyser to have excess waste minerals filtered from their blood. Treatment can take up to four hours and needs to be done around three times a week, having a huge impact on the patient's quality of life. CAPD uses a catheter directly into the patient's peritoneal cavity to collect waste fluids and replace them with dialysis solution, which is left in the body for around five hours and does the work that would normally be done by the kidney. As it is a simple process that can be completed at home, patients can enjoy a relatively normal lifestyle. However, the length of time the catheter needs to be left in the body and its direct insertion into the peritoneal cavity leaves the patient especially vulnerable to infection which often means the removal of the catheter and a return to traditional hospital-based haemodialysis.