Thank you so much for your interest in Vessel! We have a goal of making all different types of Wellness testing affordable and accessible at-home. Right now, our testing ability is fairly simple and our product is intended only for maintaining and encouraging a healthy lifestyle and is unrelated to the diagnosis, cure, mitigation, prevention, or treatment of a disease or condition. However, we do have hopes of being able to assist individuals with End-Stage Renal Disease with testing in the future, but our technology is just not there yet.
Here is a little background information as to why:
We use specific gravity and creatinine to get accurate results in our testing. Both are a measure of how well the kidneys are working to concentrate urine and filter waste. With end-stage renal disease (ESRD) and dialysis, these tests will be altered and therefore may give an inaccurate result.
Additionally, dialysis is a treatment that does some of the things done by your kidneys to help take care of your body's needs. Dialysis keeps your body in balance by:
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removing waste, salt, and extra water through urine to prevent them from building up in the body
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keeping a safe level of certain chemicals in your blood, such as potassium, sodium, and bicarbonate
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helping to control blood pressure
With this in mind, our tests use urine as a way to measure testing results, and all the fluids in our body must run through the kidneys before they are excreted as urine. Therefore, the testing results would vary immensely from day to day based on a myriad of factors including dialysis, fluid, electrolytes, and dietary intakes. It may be difficult to get a true picture of the body's nutrient levels since they would be adjusted via dialysis.
Finally, the recommendations suggested in the app would not be accurate for someone with ESRD. With ESRD there are typically individual recommendations on certain food restrictions, sodium, potassium, and fluid intake to name a few.
For these reasons, the results may not be accurately portrayed and we would recommend testing exclusively through a primary care doctor and speaking with a dietitian that specializes in ESRD and dialysis as they will be able to provide specific recommendations based on exact needs!
This article has been authored by Sinead Adedipe and peer reviewed by Mikaela Frame and Leah Cromwell.
