Pruritus in Renal Disease

Excerpt

Uremic pruritus, now better named “chronic kidney disease-associated pruritus” (CKD-aP), remains a frequent and compromising symptom in patients with advanced or end-stage renal disease (Mettang et al. 1996). Most therapeutic trials have shown only limited success. Several times in the past a new treatment option has been reported to be effective, but very soon thereafter conflicting results appear (De Marchi et al. 1992; Balaskas and Uldall 1992; Peer et al. 1996; Pauli-Magnus et al. 2000b). The main obstacle in the effort to create effective treatment modalities is the incomplete knowledge of the underlying pathophysiological mechanisms. Furthermore, given the great clinical heterogeneity of patients with kidney failure, systematically performed studies are hard to undertake and therefore sparse.