Association between renal function and cognition in childhood chronic renal failure

Forty-five children with renal failure who were either being medically managed, receiving dialysis (hemodialysis or continuous ambulatory peritoneal dialysis) therapy or who had received successful kidney transplants were longitudinally examined on multiple neuropsychological measures. A variety of medical parameters was also obtained at each time of testing. The neuropsychological variables were correlated with the medical variables using the repeated measures regression analysis method. There were associations between levels of renal function, short-term memory and list learning. Other neuropsychological variables did not in general correlate with the medical parameters consistently for all ages at the time of initial testing. Verbal performance decreased with increasing duration of renal failure in 6- to 11-year-olds and immediate recall decreased with increasing percentile rank of systolic blood pressure in 16- to 18-year-olds.