Morbidity and mortality in ESRD patients on regular hemodialysis: a single center experience

This is a prospective study of the outcome of patients with end-stage renal disease (ESRD) on regular hemodialysis admitted to a referral hospital in Madinah Al Munawarah, Saudi Arabia during a six-month period from January-June 2003. Ninety four patients out of 395 (23.7%) patients on regular hemodialysis were admitted 125 times of whom 27 (28.7%) patients were admitted twice; males accounted for 58.5% of the patients. The mean hospital stay period was 9.1 days per patient. The major cause of ESRD was diabetes mellitus (40%) followed by hypertension (13.6%). The main cause for admission was the vascular access related problems (33.6%) followed by infection (31.2%) and cardiovascular causes (18.4%). Most of the admissions were in the general ward but 17 % of the total stay in hospital was in the intensive care unit. Twelve out of the 94 (12.7%) study patients died during the study period; five patients died of cardiac failure, three of septicemia, one of severe gastrointestinal bleeding and one of Wegner's syndrome complicated by severe intra-pulmonary bleeding. Two patients had sudden death (most likely due to cardiac disease). In conclusion, our experience with morbidity and mortality of the hemodialysis patients admitted to hospital is comparable to other places in the world.