Elderly kidney disease patients may live as long with medical treatment as they would if they underwent dialysis, a new study finds.

Worldwide, increasing numbers of older patients are developing kidney failure, or end-stage kidney disease, that can be treated with renal replacement therapy such as kidney transplantation or dialysis, which is the use of a machine to filter wastes, salts and fluids from the job when the kidneys can no longer do the job.

Some experts have questioned whether elderly patients, who often have other medical conditions, are likely to benefit from these treatment options and should instead opt to be treated conservatively with medical care.

A team from the Netherlands looked at 311 elderly patients with end-stage kidney disease and compared the survival between the 204 that chose dialysis and 107 that had conservative medical management. Such treatment included control of fluid and electrolyte balance, correcting anemia, and providing appropriate palliative and end of life care.

For those patients age 80 and older, dialysis afforded no significant additional survival time. In general, patients with additional medical illnesses died sooner than patients with only kidney disease, the study found.

These findings do not mean that such elderly patients should not be offered dialysis, but it does not that the treatment makes little or no difference in terms of survival.  However, additional research is needed to find out whether the procedure does make a difference in terms of symptoms and/or quality of life, they added, referring to the study, which appears in the Clinical Journal of the American Society of Nephrology