Ten years' survey of dialysis-associated tuberculosis

Tuberculosis associated with dialysis was studied at the Renal Unit of the Tokyo Medical and Dental University and Yokosuka Mutual Aid Hospital Kidney Center, in both of which the treatments of chronic renal failure are the same. There are 12 tuberculosis patients out of 367 patients on maintenance hemodialysis from January 1967 to December 1976, an incidence of 3.3%. This was 6-16 times greater than that in the general population of this country according to yearly statistics. The characteristics of dialysis-associated tuberculosis include a high incidence of miliary tuberculosis, especially in aged patients and difficulty in establishing the diagnosis before death. Clinical features which are helpful in the early diagnosis are intermittent high fever of unknown origin, weight loss, anorexia, abnormalities of the central nervous system, erythrocyte sedimentation rate over 100 mm/h, leukocytosis and high value of the C-reactive protein. With the increasing number of dialysis patients, an increase of dialysis-associated tuberculosis is expected and this will be one of the major problems of dialysis patients in future.