European Best Practice Guidelines 1–4 Evaluating anaemia and initiating treatment

Abstract

and 26.4% of peritoneal dialysis patients. Table 11 Results summarizes the results by country, and some betweencountry variation is observed. Figure 3 presents aggregKey points from the EBPG ate findings for both cohorts of patients. In 35.1% of patients, the start of dialysis and initiation of epoetin $ Evaluate anaemia in chronic renal failure therapy were simultaneous. Only 7.9% of patients were (CRF ) patients when haemoglobin (Hb) is started on epoetin in the 6 months preceding dialysis, 6 months before’ and ‘>6 months Hb is consistently 25% of haemodialysis patients and >30% of peritoneal dialysis patients started epoetin therapy with haeAs EBPG 1–3 are narrative guidelines for which no moglobin levels between 8 and 8.9 g/dl, and >25% of empirical support is available, the data reported here dialysis patients started treatment below 8 g/dl. These pertain mainly to EBPG 4 [1]. They are complemented starting haemoglobin levels were consistent regardless with additional results that support the main issues in of the relationship between start of dialysis and initithis cluster of guidelines. ation of epoetin therapy for both haemodialysis and The relationship between the start of dialysis and peritoneal dialysis patients (Figure 5). Some variability initiation of epoetin treatment was examined. As shown between Western European countries was observed in Figure 2, the patterns are different for haemodialysis