Dialysis and Muscle Weakness

Weakness is a lack of physical or muscle strength and the feeling that extra effort is required to move your arms, legs, or other muscles. If muscle weakness is the result of pain, the person may be able to make muscles work, but it will hurt.

Symptoms of weakness post dialysis can be due to the removal of excess fluids.

In this scenario we can do the following things:

1) See if his target weight needs to be moved upwards. It means he comes off at say 58kgs at the end of dialysis. This is seen if the patient has been putting on some real weight.

If the patient has been eating well or is passing large quantity of urine, then this often happens.
2) If he needs to come off at 57 kgs then we could do the following:

a. We need to reduce his weight gain between 2 dialyses by strictly cutting back on salt and restricting the fluid intake to match his urine output.

b. We could try to extend the dialysis time by 1 hour. By doing this we remove the same quantity of fluid over a longer time which makes it easier on the body.

c. The best option would be to increase the frequency of dialysis. We can have 4 sessions/ week or even do something called as short daily hemodialysis .

Vitamin D is necessary for healthy bones. Vitamin D is made in our skin when we are exposed to sunlight, but it is also found in foods that we eat and in vitamin pills. Low levels of vitamin D are common in many groups of people, because we do not get enough sun during the winter and because we eat few foods that have vitamin D in them. Some foods with vitamin D are salmon, mackerel, tuna, and fortified milk, which has had vitamin D added to it.