Health & Fitness

Renal kidney failure is another term for kidney failure. Kidney failure is measured by how well the kidneys filter wastes from the blood. The most common measurement of this filtration rate is is glomerular filtration rate, or GFR.

Renal Kidney Failure Basics
Renal kidney failure is said to occur when the GFR falls 10% to 15% below what is found in a person with normal kidney function. This may be the result of a sudden shock, injury, blood loss or reaction to medication or it might be after several years of slow and progressive blood loss. Regardless of how this failure occurred, the only treatment option in the short term is dialysis treatment that takes over the functioning of the failed kidney. However, depending on the cause and type of damage that led to this failure, the longer-term goals differ.

If the renal kidney failure is the result of years of progressive kidney disease, dialysis will need to continue until a transplant is found. If the kidney renal failure is the result of a single trauma like a blood loss or reaction to medication the prognosis is different. In that case, dialysis only continues until the patients kidney recovers.

Dialysis falls into two main categories, defined by where the blood filtration takes place. The first is hemodialysis, which filters the blood in a machine outside the patients body in a special machine filled with filtration units and dialzying solution. The second is peritoneal dialysis, which uses tissues inside the patients abdomen as a filter. In this type of dialysis, dialyzing solution is inducted into the patients peritoneal cavity then drained and disposed of four or five hours later.