European best practice guidelines for the management of anaemia in patients with chronic renal failure

Best practice guidelines recommend management strategies and attempt to set standards for optimal patient care. The momentum towards formulating guide lines comes not only from health care professionals, but also from health c are management organizations, who need some way of measuring the quality of the services they purchase. The European Best Practice Guidelines for the Management of Anaemia in Patients with Chronic Renal Failure have been draw n up by a Working Party including representatives of the European Renal Ass ociation/European Dialysis and Transplantation Association (ERA-EDTA) and t he national nephrology societies of a cross-section of European countries. The guidelines draw on the National Kidney Foundation-Dialysis Outcomes Qua lity Initiative (NKF-DOQI(TM)) Clinical Best Practice Guidelines for the Tr eatment of Anemia in Chronic Renal Failure, but reflect European clinical p ractice and experience. They include additional publications, and new analy sis and interpretation of the evidence base. Topics covered in the European guidelines include diagnosis of the anaemia of chronic renal failure, indi cations for starting treatment with epoetin, recommended minimum target hae moglobin concentrations, epoetin dosage and route of administration, assess ing and optimizing iron stores, causes and management of epoetin resistance , and possible adverse effects of epoetin treatment. The guidelines are not intended to be prescriptive but rather to provide clinical guidance based on the best available evidence. The evidence supporting each guideline is g raded, so that physicians may judge its reliability.