Intradialytic oxygen saturation

Published on February 3, 2019   19 min

Other Talks in the Series: The Kidney in Health and Disease

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0:00
Hello everyone, my name is Lili Chan and I'm currently faculty at the Icahn School of Medicine at Mount Sinai. I'm glad you have chosen to learn more about oxygen saturation in hemodialysis patients. I think it is interesting that while we routinely measure blood pressure and heart rate during hemodialysis, we neglect the other vital sign of oxygen saturation. That leads us to our topic of intradialytic oxygen supplementation, what does it mean and should we care about it?
0:28
The outline of today's talk will be to first review what oxygen saturation is and what we currently know about hypoxemia in hemodialysis patients, then we will discuss specifically intradialytic hypoxemia. Next we will review what we know about intradialytic central venous oxygen saturation, and we will finish with a discussion on what has been done and what we can do for abnormal oxygen saturation levels. Let's start with what oxygen saturation is and what we know about hypoxemia in hemodialysis patients.
0:59
Oxygen saturation is the fraction of hemoglobin with oxygen bound to it over the total hemoglobin in blood. As displayed in the graph, normal oxygen saturation levels are more than 93% in humans.
1:13
There are many different ways that oxygen saturation can be measured, displayed here are two of the most common methods. On the left is a person obtaining an arterial blood sample where oxygen saturation levels can be directly measured. On the right is a commercially available pulse oximeter which measures oxygen saturation indirectly. Pulse oximeters measure oxygen saturation by detecting the differences in absorption of red and infrared lights between oxygenated and deoxygenated hemoglobin.