Acute Effects of Intradialytic Exercise on Cardiovascular Function in Hemodialysis Patients

Patients with kidney failure requiring hemodialysis (HD) treatment die at excessively high rates, despite advances in HD techniques and pharmacological therapies. This indicates additional therapeutic strategies are needed. Intradialytic exercise (IDEX, exercise during HD treatment) represents a low-cost, easy to administer treatment strategy that could potentially improve cardiovascular function, physical function and quality of life. However, nephrologists rarely counsel their patients to increase their physical activity levels or to exercise during HD treatment, in part due to a lack of understanding of IDEX knowledge. Providing more robust evidence for the safety and effectiveness of IDEX, as well as evaluating the impact of exercising early vs late in the treatment, could help improve adoption of exercise training as a standard practice in HD clinics. Therefore, investigators plan to examine the impact of IDEX and its timing during treatment (1st vs 3rd hour) on blood pressure and adverse symptoms in HD patients. The proposed study also includes various cardiovascular measures to allow deeper mechanistic understanding of cardiovascular physiology with IDEX. Such understanding will significantly advance the field and lead to improved therapeutic approaches, including exercise training, which may help mediate the deleterious effects of renal failure.