Objectives:

This study aims to describe suffering according to severity of symptoms in patients with End-Stage Renal Disease undergoing hemodialysis.

Materials and Method:

The study is transversal, descriptive and observational with some tasks of correlation in a sample of 31 patients. The assessment tools were; the interview, the instrument to detect wellbeing/disturbance proposed by Bayés and collaborators and a series of subscales of the Edmonton Symptom Assessment Scale/ESAS to identify the intensity and frequency of symptoms that could be associated to suffering.

Results:

87.1 % of the sample showed a low presence of symptoms with severe intensity associated to suffering in the last 24 hours, 77.4% showed low presence in the last week and 61.3 % showed a low presence in a period of one month. No significant association was found between the presence of symptoms with severe intensity associated to suffering in 24 hours.

Conclusions:

The majority of subjects were characterized by low presence of symptoms with severe intensity associated to that suffering. The magnitude of a set of symptoms did not result in an important factor associated to the suffering in these patients.