Dwell Time

[murf]

Couple of questions about the dwell time while on four daily exchanges. What would be the minimum time you should be between exchanges for it to be effective and also the maximum time? On the maximum time, if I have an exchange at 10.00pm, go to bed and get up at 8.00am, is that too late? I also read somewhere that a short dwell time will take off a lot of fluid but give lousy dialysis. Correct?

[looneytunes]

Hi Murf.  Basing this on the answers we got to these questions from our PD team, the max dwell time should be 4 hours because you will start absorbing the solution after that.  The minimum time we were told was 2 hours because of the "good fluid draw/lousy cleansing" if it was less than that.  My husband was on manuals for a while and he did his at 8am, noon, 3pm and 7 with a final drain at 10:30 pm and no overnight dwell.  You might check with your PD team to see what they recommend for you.  Also, there are plenty of other members who have had PD experience that will most likely jump in here too. 

[KICKSTART]

Everyone is different it depends how quickly you re-asorb the fluid (i was quick) If you do less than 2 hours dialysis forget it , not only will it not do much in the way of toxin removal , but might not even pull off much fluid. If you are worried about overnight , do you not have Extraneal? that is designed for long dwells , up to about 14 hours irrc. If not dont worry i used to do a last exchange at 9 pm and sometimes not get up till 10am ! All i found was i had re-absorbed a good part of the fluid !

[peleroja]

My clinic told me that after 6 hours you start to reabsorb fluid.  I use the cycler and have 5 dwells of 1 hour and 27 minutes, with a final fill of Extraneal.

[Jie]

The UF is maximum at about one hour of dwell, so the reabsorbing fluid usually starts after one hour.  If the goal is to get rid of fluid, one should have only about one hour of dwell time. However, it usually needs longer than one hour dwell time for toxin cleaning.