Prospective, Observational and Multi-center Study of a Comparison of Quality of Life on Automated Peritoneal Dialysis and Continuous Ambulatory Peritoneal Dialysis

Automated peritoneal dialysis (APD) was first described in 1981, 5 years after the introduction of continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis (CAPD). It is increasingly used increasingly used in comparison with CAPD from 20% in 1995 to more than 33% of PD patients in North America in 1998, and in 2000, 54% of PD patients in the United States performed some form of APD.

APD has been several advantages over CAPD such as reduced incidence of peritonitis, mechanical complications and greater psychosocial acceptability. Many studies demonstrated a benefit for APD. In one Mexican retrospective study, APD has a better technical survival than CAPD with improvement of 1st peritonitis episode and French registry data showed the better peritonitis-free probability and autonomy in APD compared to CAPD. One study found that peritonitis rates and hospitalization were significantly less in patients on APD when results were expressed as episode/patient-year. Also a small randomized clinical trial comparing APD and CAPD showed that APD can help to keep selected patients vocationally or socially active.

Although APD has been expected to improve better condition of peritoneal dialysis patients, convincing evidence of major advantages is lacking and a benefit for APD is not demonstrated.

In three of randomized clinical trials, APD, APD did not differ from CAPD with respect to mortality (RR 1.49, 95% CI 0.51 to 4.37), risk of peritonitis(RR 0.75, 95% CI 0.50 to 1.11), switching from original PD modality to a different dialysis modality(RR 0.50, 95% CI 0.25 to 1.02), hernias(RR 1.26, 95% CI 0.32 to 5.01), PD fluid leaks(RR 1.06, 95% CI 0.11 to 9.83), PD catheter removal ( RR 0.64, 95% CI 0.27 to 1.48) or hospital admissions (RR0.96, 95% CI 0.43 to 2.17). In addition APD has potential disadvantages compared with CAPD like a possible faster in residual renal function, less sodium removal and more peritoneal protein loss and more expensive than CAPD. All of three large cohorts, NECOSAD, USRDS and ANZDATA showed that the risk of technical failure was not different between APD and CAPD but similar.

Because results on comparison between APD and CAPD is vague, prospective, observational and multi-center study in incident patients are required to gain more insight into survival on APD compared with CAPD in the course of peritoneal dialysis.