EPO Doping Hormones Reduce The Risk Of Very Preterm Infants Brain Abnormality

Three doses of erythropoietin (EPO), is a Blood doping hormone that stimulates to form red blood cells, immediately after birth it significantly reduces Brain damage in preterm infants. A study was published by the Journal of American Medical Association on Tuesday 26 August 2014.

Across the over 2.6 million babies are born before the 32nd week of pregnancy, according to World health organization (WHO)

There are many health implications of the children who are born pretermly, also including with brain damage and incomplete health and brain maturation. EPO Doping effects are well known, this is a treatment used to prevent anemia and kidney diseases used in preterm infants to reduce blood transfusions. The recent studies showed that the same hormones haveneuroprotectiveeffect.

The recent study in Switzerland amazingly almost 495 infants were born between 26 weeks to 32 weeks of gestation and randomly assigned to take EPO or placebo intravenously before 3 hours of birth, and   12 to 18 hours, and at 36 to 42 hours after birth. The researchers and specialist used a magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) technique to 165 infants of 495.

“Co-author Russia Ha-VinhLeuchter of the University Hospital of Geneva said that”We found that the brains of the children who had received the treatment had much less damage than those in the control group, who had been given a placebo.”

The survivals of preterm infants have improved over decades, but more increase in the number of those infants is affected with long term disability and brain and organ maturation problems. Preterm infants are the risk of forming encephalopathy of prematurity; this includes structural changes of brain white matter and associated with long-term neuroprotective delay. EPO has shown some beneficial effects on the neuroprotective effects in observation studies and retrospective studies.

The specialist and Researchers are calling to trail EPO; it seems to be helping the brains of preterm infants in starting the week of the birth.

Dr Jane Hawdon, is a neonatologist at the Barts Health NHS Trust, she was not involved with this particular study, he said that any treatment that would reduce term problems in Preterm infants warranted further reviews.

Children would have disorder after decades passing; the study says that infant’s birth early would cause harmful disabilities to the children. Preterm infants who are born too early (born between 26 weeks to 32 weeks) like saying before will have improper structure of Brain Maturation and Organs maturation too. So this study would spread all over the world and save many preterm infants.