Survival on maintenance dialysis in patients with chronic renal failure associated with paraplegia and quadriplegia.
Forty men with end-stage renal failure associated with spinal cord injury were treated with maintenance hemodialysis. There were 28 paraplegic and 12 quadriplegic patients. Survival on dialysis was significantly shorter in quadriplegics (5.5 +/- 5.0 months) than paraplegics (22.9 +/- 27.0 months). The cumulative I- and 2-year survival in paraplegics were 60 per cent and 52 per cent respectively. The respective values for quadriplegics were 34 per cent and 17 per cent. Various infections proved to be the immediate cause of death in the majority of our patients.