The incidence and prevalence of ESRD in the United States continues to increase. Currently there are over 26,000 patients maintained on peritoneal dialysis. Mortality rates have fallen over the past several years, but long-term survival remains poor, with only 11% of peritoneal dialysis patients surviving past 10 years. Cardiovascular disease accounts for most deaths, and dialysis patients have many traditional and nontraditional cardiovascular risk factors. Lowering of these risk factors has not resulted in reduced cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in dialysis patients. Maneuvers to improve long-term peritoneal dialysis patient survival must therefore focus on modifiable risk factors including residual renal function, peritoneal membrane integrity, rate of infections, and peritoneal dialysis center size. This article reviews strategies for preserving residual renal function and peritoneal membrane integrity as well as strategies for reducing the rate of infections to enhance long-term survival in peritoneal dialysis patients.Clin J Am Soc Nephrol 5: 1123-1131, 2010. doi: 10.2215/CJN.04300709T he incidence and prevalence of ESRD continues to increase worldwide. In the United States alone there are over 480,000 patients on dialysis and the number of incident dialysis patients each year exceeds 100,000 (1). Peritoneal dialysis (PD) is an established treatment modality for patients with ESRD. Currently, 26,082 patients are maintained on PD in the United States (1). Mortality rates in ESRD patients have declined significantly over the past 20 years, but longterm survival remains poor, with the overall survival for all dialysis patients [hemodialysis (HD) and PD] being only 11%. These data were not censored for modality change, the effect of which is difficult to gauge. On a proportional basis, a greater percentage of PD than HD patients switch modality; however, in absolute numbers, more HD patients transition to PD than the reverse. Nevertheless, the overall adjusted probability of survival in incident PD patients at 1 year is 86.8%, but only 11.3% at 10 years (1). The reason for this dramatic decrease in patient survival over time is multifactorial and depends on several patient and dialysis center factors.There are several patient factors that affect survival on PD, most of which are nonmodifiable. Age, presence of diabetes, ESRD etiology, and ESRD vintage are all independent predictors of patient survival (2). For each 1-year increase in age, the risk of death increases by 4% [adjusted hazard ratio (HR) 1.04, P Ͻ 0.0001]. Patients with diabetes have a 30% increased risk of death compared with nondiabetic patients, and dialysis-naive patients have a 28% decreased risk of death compared with patients transferred from HD (2). Cardiovascular disease (CVD) accounts for most deaths in dialysis patients (approximately 50%). The genetics of the patient may be another nonmodifiable determinant of CVD. For example, a recent study of 1200 HD patients found an increased risk of CVD in patients with a specific complemen...