Dr. William Keane presented the data and said that it was his hunch that dialysis patients need rapid statin treatment (for lowering cholesterol) as a routine medication.

Here is a news article from the same conference that suggests that half the population of the United States could one day be taking cholesterol-lowering statin drugs as the price of these drugs falls with generic competition.

Statins may also prevent osteoporosis, as two recent studies showed, which would be another useful benefit for dialysis patients.

May 18, 2000 - An article appears in this week's issue of the New England Journal of Medicine that demonstrates for the first time that young ESRD patients have a high incidence of coronary artery calcification. You can view the abstract for free, but must subscribe to NEJM in order to view the entire article.

This article will likely generate dialogue about the importance of controlling the calcium times phosphorus product (keep it under 70) and the implications of using large doses of calcium-containing medications in treating dialysis patients (primarily for bone disease).

At least one pharmaceutical company is already using this article in its marketing efforts. (link is no longer available)

For those interested in related articles, here is a search result from the National Library of Medicine for dialysis AND metastatic calcification.

Here are the Cardiovascular Disease and the Ca/P/Bone Disease topics pages from RenalWEB.