The International journal of artificial organs
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Continuous renal replacement therapy (CRRT) is frequently used in critically ill patients with acute renal failure and sepsis. Frequent circuit changes increase nursing workload, blood loss and costs, and also compromise achievement of the filtration rate goal. Circuit downtime is the most important factor that compromises the cumulative filtration goal. ⋯ In addition to monitoring the complication rate, the evaluation of circuit lifetime using survival analysis stratified by anticoagulation strategy is a simple and feasible means of assessing the quality of CRRT in the ICU.