What is Blood purification

What is Blood purification

Blood purification is a therapy which helps remove the waste products in the body by filtering the blood. Dialysis is a very common branch of blood purification. However, dialysis only deals with the small sized toxins in the blood. If you are in kidney failure, the medium and larger waste products should be removed by other techniques of blood purification.

Currently, blood purification includes hemodialysis, hemofiltration, hemoperfusion, immune adsorption, plasma exchange,CRRT etc.

Hemodialysis

Hemodialysis, which also can be called dialysis, is the most commonly seen method that used to achieve the extracorporeal removal of waste products such as creatinine, water, and urea when kidneys shut down. According to clinical studies, Hemodialysis is more effective in removing substances with small molecules, so actually it is far from enough for kidney failure patients to purify their blood simply with hemodialysis.

Hemofiltration

Compared with hemodialysis, hemofiltration is always used in intensive care settings in case of acute renal failure. And it removes both the small and middle sized wastes in the blood, such as chemicals, bilirubin and excessive vitamins.

Hemofiltration has the advantage of removing solutes small enough to pass through the ultrafilter in proportion to their plasma concentration rather than their concentration gradient, as with diffusion.The driving force is a pressure gradient rather than a concentration gradient. The rate of solute removal is proportional to the applied pressure that can be adjusted to meet the needs of the clinical situation.

Hemodiafiltration

Hemodiafiltration integrates the merits of hemodialysis and hemofiltration; therefore, treatment effects of hemodiafiltration are better than that of the above two blood purification therapies. Even so, hemodiafiltration is not a perfect blood purification technology as it may cause great loose of protein, soluble vitamin, trace elements and so on.

Immune adsorption

Immune adsorption is a therapy which uses adsorbing materials to alternatively or specifically remove the pathogenic factors related to immune system in the blood. It usually used in immune system diseases and liver diseases.

Immune adsorption takes DNA antigen as aglucon to combine with spherical carbonization resin carrier and form the adsorbent, whose special adsorptive function will be applied to clean the pathological factors such as immune complex in Renal Failure patients' blood selectively and specially.

Plasma exchange

Plasmapheresis is done to exchange plasma in the blood. Plasma is the liquid part of the blood that does not contain cells. Once the plasma is removed, fresh plasma or a plasma substitute is added back to the blood.

It shows promising effects in treating the following kidney diseases: anti-glomerular basement membrane disease, Acute Glomerulonephritis, serious Focal Segmental Glomerulonephritis, Lupus Nephritis, crescent Glomerulonephritis, immune kidney disease, lipoprotein glomerulopathy etc.