Part B: Outcomes With ESRD Therapy: A Critical Overview from The United States.

Patient survival is a very basic but important outcome of any therapeutic intervention. In the case of end stage renal disease (ESRD), outcome studies have included several other outcomes such as quality of life indicators, morbidity measures (e.g., hospitalizations), length of time on a treatment modality (‘technique survival') and survival with a functioning kidney allograft (graft survival). The establishment of regional and national registries has markedly facilitated the evaluation of these outcomes in actual practice rather than in the referral practice or related multicenter environment. This chapter will focus primarily on population-based patient survival studies using information from the United States Renal Data System (USRDS) and the Michigan Kidney Registry [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]