What is it about?
This is a systematic review of clinical trials evaluating erythropoietin in infants with perinatal asphyxia
Featured Image
Why is it important?
Good number of infants have difficulties during the birth process which can affect the blood supply to their brain. These infants receive supportive care including body cooling or brain cooling in neonatal intensive care units to reduce the impact of brain injury and death. However, a proportion of infants still suffer brain injury despite these measures. Hence, newer interventions are tried in neonates, one of which is erythropoietin. Erythropoietin is a hormone that stimulates bone marrow to produce more red blood cells when a person has low blood or hemoglobin. However, there is animal and human data that suggest it also reduces brain injury.
Perspectives
There are number of clinical trials so far conducted in neonates with perinatal asphyxia. This research aim to combine all these trials and provide clinical evidence. Overall, the results are encouraging that erythropoietin reduces brain injury, risk of cerebral palsy, and cognitive impairment in neonates with perinatal asphyxia. However, evidence quality is limited due to small number of participants and trials. Hence, larger trials, particularly evaluating the combination of erythropoietin with cooling versus cooling alone, are needed. These trials are already on way, and should be able to provide us the better quality of evidence in another few years.
Abdul Razak
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: Erythropoietin in perinatal hypoxic-ischemic encephalopathy: a systematic review and meta-analysis, Journal of Perinatal Medicine, May 2019, De Gruyter,
DOI: 10.1515/jpm-2018-0360.
You can read the full text:
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
