Association between primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration and clinical outcomes in patients with stage 5 chronic kidney disease: a JOINT-KD cohort study.

Background: Primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration plays an important role in the management of chronic kidney disease (CKD). However, the benefits of such collaboration in patients with stage 5 CKD remain unclear.

Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study of adult outpatients with stage 5 CKD across nine nephrology centers in Japan. The exposure of interest was primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration. We examined the association between primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration and clinical outcomes in adult outpatients with stage 5 CKD: dialysis initiation and cause-specific hospitalizations using the Fine-Gray models, which treat death and preemptive kidney transplantation and death and kidney replacement therapy as competing risk events, respectively.

Results: Of the 570 patients included in the analysis, 91 (16.0%) received primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration, whereas the remaining patients were treated by nephrologists alone. During a median follow-up of 1.4 years, 399 (70.0%) patients started dialysis, 11 (1.9%) received preemptive kidney transplantation, and 53 (9.3%) died. There were no significant between-group differences in dialysis initiation and CKD- and cardiovascular-related hospitalizations (adjusted subdistribution hazard ratio [SHR] [95% confidence interval], 0.89 [0.64-1.23], 1.22 [0.78-1.90], and 0.95 [0.46-1.98], respectively). However, primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration was associated with a lower risk of infection-related hospitalization (adjusted SHR [95% confidence interval], 0.36 [0.15-0.87]).

Conclusions: Our findings suggest that primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration in the management of stage 5 CKD is not associated with delayed dialysis initiation but is associated with a lower risk of infection-related hospitalization, indicating the potential benefits of primary care physician-nephrologist collaboration in stage 5 CKD.