"Waiting: Life on the list"
My Sunday article on dialysis patient Waymond Blackmon is online here. You can use the comments to this post to comment on the article. I've gotten a couple of e-mails on it from readers and am awaiting their permission to post excerpts.
UPDATE: Reader Glenn Millis writes: "You kept saying people last for a long time on dialysis. Some people do. Young people mainly. Other's beat the odds. But the fact is that about 40% of the people starting dialysis at age 50 are dead in 5 years and 90% are dead in 10 years. One of the things many people think is that people can just do dialysis forever. They can't. They die. They end up being too sick to receive a transplant. Not all. But especially older people."
While I can't vouch for Millis's exact figures, he's right about depressed life expectancy for dialysis patients. My article said some people have lived on dialysis for decades, and that's accurate, but I should have made clearer that many dialysis patients don't, particularly older ones.
The U.S. Renal Data System has a report online (*.pdf file) that compares overall life expectancy at various ages with life expectancy at those same ages for dialysis patients (p. 8 in the 18-page report).
The numbers are sobering. Among the general population, people in the 25-29 age group can expect to live another 51.7 years, but among dialysis patients people in that age group can expect to live an average of 12.6 years. Members of the general population in the 50-54 age group can expect to live another 26.8 years, while dialysis patients in that group have an average life expectancy of 6.2 years. (The chart also includes life expectancy for people who have received transplants. As you would expect, the life expectancies are considerably longer for those patients than for dialysis patients.)
