[Financial incentives and dialysis].

Chronic renal replacement therapy by hemodialysis costs 55,000 Euros per year and constitutes the upper limit of a cost-effective treatment. Since reimbursement for dialysis is high, every patient who is in need of it will receive dialysis. Nephrology outside the hospital, however, is moving into a progress trap.

Cyclophosphamide pulse therapy in advanced progressive IgA nephropathy.

For advanced progressive primary IgA nephropathy (IgAN) no established therapy exists. We conducted a prospective, uncontrolled trial to evaluate the effect of intravenous cyclophosphamide pulse (CyP) therapy on the course of advanced progressive IgAN. Twenty-one patients (mean age 52 +/- 10 years; male/female 20/1) with biopsy-proven IgAN without crescentic extracapillary proliferation and a serum creatinine of more than 2.