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Erythropoietin - a Double-edged Sword
February 04, 2008 at 5:19 PM
Drug News
A study conducted on mice by an ophthalmologist at Childrens Hospital, Boston suggested that administering erythropoietin may worsen the condition of anaemia patients. The outcome of the study has raised the doubt for administering it to retinopathy and cancer patients.
For the study, Smith and his colleague Jing Chen, PhD, worked in mice with retinopathy, an eye disease that begins after the death of healthy blood vessels nourishing the retina. Numerous vessels then grow in, but they are deformed. Ultimately, the deformed vessels may pull the retina off the back of the eye, causing blindness.
After measuring erythropoietin produced in the retina as the disease progressed, the researchers found that the production was 3 to 10 times below normal during early-stage retinopathy, when healthy blood vessels died, and 12 to 33 times above normal during late-stage retinopathy, when deformed blood vessels grew into the retina.
The next step was to examine whether the administration of erythropoietin could treat retinopathy. For this, erythropoietin was injected into the bloodstream either early, as the mice lost healthy blood vessels, or later, when deformed blood vessels began to
invade--then compared them with untreated mice.
Early bolstering of erythropoietin slowed the disease, while raising erythropoietin later, when deformed blood vessels were present, seemed to accelerate the disease;
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