Measuring Platelet Aggregation in Dialysis Patients With a Whole Blood Aggregometer by the Screen Filtration Pressure Method

A semi-automatic, whole-blood aggregometer based on the screen filtration pressure (SFP) method is now widely used clinically and in research, but has not been used with hemodialysis (HD) patients. We measured whole-blood platelet aggregation in HD patients by the SFP method. This retrospective cross-sectional study included 62 HD patients, of whom 47 were non-diabetic and 15 were diabetic; we also included a control group of healthy, non-uremic subjects. With the t-test, we examined differences in the platelet aggregation threshold index (PATI) in meaningful sub-groupings of the HD patients, depending on whether or not they had diabetes, and whether or not they had been given antiplatelet agents. Considering the non-diabetic HD patients first, their PATI values were significantly higher than those values in the control subjects (3.1 [1.0-5.2] vs. 1.8 [1.3-2.3] mu M, P < 0.001). The non-diabetic HD patients taking antiplatelet agents showed significantly (1.9 times) higher PATI values than the non-diabetic HD patients without antiplatelet agents (4.4 [1.8-7.0] vs. 2.3 [1.3-3.3] mu M, P = 0.003). We observed similar trends among diabetic HD patients. Whole-blood analysis by the SPF method seems to be a promising way of monitoring platelet function for HD patients.