Last Thursday I blogged (link) about a online calculator for Kt/V that is provided by Fresenius (see link). I tossed it out there for patients to play around with but did not articulate about one very important aspect of the calculation. This blog is to rectify that shortcoming on my part. Thus the “cleanup.”
In the left panel center section you have the option of setting “Residual Kidney Function.” For the example I used, I set it to zero. Since I am still urinating, albeit not that much, it is NOT zero but some positive number, probably for me about 0.3. If you increase this from zero to 0.3 in the left panel, the calculations in the right panel, yields 1.7 on the dial. The dial reading is a combination of what your kidney is producing and what Kt/V is obtained from dialysis itself. There are two components. There’s a label at the bottom of the third panel as “Kidney Weekly Kt/V” and “Peritoneal Kt/V.” Thus the dial is showing both.
Sorry for any confusion. Since Kt/V is so central to our dialysis well being, tomorrow’s blog will dig even deeper into it. The more patients know, the better patients they can become. Certainly that is the goal for all of us, regardless of what ails us.
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