Survival of paediatric end-stage renal disease (ESRD) patients increased substantially over the past decades. However, their mortality risk still remains much higher than that of healthy peers. The higher mortality risk is shown to be dependent on various patient and treatment characteristics, such as age, sex, race, primary renal disease, treatment modality, time on treatment, and residual kidney function, as well as on the degree of economic welfare of the country in which patients are treated.
As ESRD in children is a rare condition, various (inter)national registries collect data on this patient group for epidemiological research, including the evaluation of patient survival. However, all these registries use different methods to calculate these survival statistics, which hampers a fair comparison.
In this study, we would like to combine patient-level information from well-established renal replacement therapy (RRT) registries in different continents (i.e. North-America, Europe and Oceania) in order (1) to assess whether there are differences in patient survival and in causes of death between these continents and (2) to evaluate whether patient survival and causes of death have changed over time.
The results of this study may offer a better understanding of any factors underlying differences in the survival of paediatric RRT patients worldwide.
