Professor of Public Health Sciences Guofen Yan and colleagues recently presented study findings to further the understanding of minorities’ survival advantage on dialysis at the 2015 American Society of Nephrology Annual Meeting.
Across the United States, more than 400,000 kidney failure patients receive maintenance dialysis each year with the mortality rate at a staggering 15-20%. It has been previously noted that among U.S. dialysis patients, Hispanics lives the longest, whites the shortest, with blacks in between. The reasons for these racial differences have not been elucidated.
Yan and colleagues sought to better understand this phenomenon by employing time-dependent survival models and characterizing how the mortality risks change over the entire course of ESRD for different racial groups. The findings drew great interest from the research community at the conference.