Association between serum β2-microglobulin and mortality in Japanese peritoneal dialysis patients: A cohort study

BACKGROUND: Higher serum β2-microglobulin (B2M) concentrations are associated with higher mortality in the general population, non-dialyzed chronic kidney disease patients and patients receiving hemodialysis (HD). However, this relationship among patients on peritoneal dialysis (PD) has not been validated. METHODS: We collected baseline data for 3,011 prevalent PD patients from a nationwide dialysis registry in Japan at the end of 2010. Clinical outcomes for 9 years were then evaluated using the registry at the end of 2011 to 2019. All-cause and cardiovascular (CV) mortality was assessed using Cox regression analysis and competing-risks regression analysis, respectively. We used multiple imputation to deal with missing covariate data. RESULTS: During a median follow-up of 87 months, 2,054 patients transferred to combined therapy with PD and HD or HD directly. A total of 3,011 patients, 1,235 (41.0%) died, including 437 patients (14.5%) from CV causes. Among them, 612 patients died after transfer to other dialysis modalities. Univariate analyses revealed no significant association between serum B2M and mortality, whereas higher serum B2M was independently associated with both all-cause and CV mortalities in adjusted models. However, the significant association between serum B2M and CV mortality disappeared in analysis treating serum B2M as a categorical variable. The effect of serum B2M on all-cause mortality was significantly higher among patients with higher urinary volume and a significant interaction was evident. CONCLUSIONS: Using a large-scale registry, we found that serum B2M contributes tenuously but significantly to worse outcome and residual kidney function significantly affects this relationship. On the contrary, serum B2M per se had no predictive value for patient outcome in prevalent PD patients.