random question...

[erin-x]

Just watching Holby City and it got me thinking about kidney failure and dialysis. If you are on dialysis, do you still produce urine?

I know that urine is the product of your kidneys flushing out toxins from your blood, so if a dialysis machine is directly filtering your blood is there any need to produce urine?

Weird question, I know! Lol!

[woofgang]

sometimes yes and sometimes no. Sometimes the kidney failure stops the kidneys passing liquid through. In that case you have to very severely limit the amount of liquid and liquid foods that you ingest. Some fluid can be taken off at dialysis but not too much at a time. Sometimes the fluid can pass through the kidney but the kidney doesn't dump the waste products into it so again they are removed from the blood by dialysis. In those circs though liquid intake can be freer. Either way inout and output are carefully measured and records kept by the individual.

[Sqad]

woofgang is correct.........at the beginning of dialysis, most, if not all patients continue to pass urine, which eventually gets less after the passage of time until it ceases completely in most dialysed patients.

The rate of decline and amount of urine depends upon how much damage the kidney has suffered.