Prevalence prognosis of the end stage renal disease patients in Greece

Abstract

Greece owns a place among the ten first countries internationally with the highest prevalent number of end stage renal disease (ESRD) patients, and among the first five with the highest incidence. Renal replacement therapy is essential for life sustention but is also characterized by high costs for the health care authorities and a great impact on patients' quality of life. Predicting the future number of ESRD patients can be utilized in healthcare decision making in order to achieve a more effective resource management. For the last decade Greece has been constantly in the first places in Europe regarding the number of the prevalent patients. In this work we present a Markov chain based model for the prediction of ESRD patients' number in Greece in the next six years. The model used data extracted from the ERA-EDTA reports covering a period from 1998 to 2006. This study concludes that there will be a 12.6% and 7.1% increase in ESRD prevalence and incidence respectively, for the period 2006-2012.