The significance of protein intake and catabolism

Diet and nutrition are integral to the management of individuals with renal disease. Uremia engenders anorexia, nausea, meat aversion, and emesis, disturbances that ultimately reduce appetite and cause weight loss and malnutrition. Protein restriction can alleviate these uremic symptoms and improve patient health and vigor, but overly zealous protein restriction may, itself, produce malnutrition. This is particularly likely when energy intake is restricted by either design or anorexia. End-stage renal disease patients require renal replacement therapy for survival, and although dialysis is life sustaining, it neither replaces normal kidney function nor obviates the need for dietary management. In this setting of controlled, persistent uremia, undernutrition can develop surreptitiously. Dialysis physicians have long regarded malnutrition as a sign of uncontrolled uremia and failing health. This supposition has now been validated by epidemiologic studies demonstrating that serum albumin and protein catabolic rate (PCR) discriminate between dialysis patients at high and low risk of death or illness. This correlation of undernutrition with health and survival persists across wide ranges of age, medical diagnoses, and dialysis prescriptions. Because PCR is readily measured using urea kinetic analyses, it has been promoted as a patient monitoring tool and under steady-state conditions it is a reliable method of determining protein intake. Although a single PCR measurement does not integrate day-to-day dietary and metabolic fluctuations and contains an inherent uncertainty of +/- 20%, sequential measurements can be used to assess changes in an individual's dietary protein intake. PCR defines nitrogen losses and, when normalized to a realistic index of metabolic activity (metabolically active body size), it can disclose subtle individual variances in nitrogen utilization. These normalized protein catabolic rates (NPCR) do not, however, measure or describe overall nutrition. The normalization schemes employed are based on population averages and only approximate an individual's true metabolic activity. Thus, using NPCR to define nutritional needs can result in overfeeding obese and underfeeding wasted subjects. Instead, nutritional adequacy should be defined by clinical inspection and comparison with defined standards. Once that state is defined, and desirable protein and calorie intakes are determined, NPCR can be used to monitor the patient's ability to maintain homeostasis.