Serum Erythropoietin Levels in Pediatric Hematologic Disorders and Impact of Recombinant Human Erythropoietin Use.

Objective: In anemic patients, the correlation between serum erythropoietin (sEpo) level and the severity of anemia has been reported previously. However, in different anemia groups, different sEpo levels are measured in patients with similar hemoglobin levels and the etiology of this situation could not be explained.

Methods: We evaluated hemoglobin and sEpo levels in 31 iron deficiency anemia, 26 Fanconi anemia (FA), 21 thallasemia intermedia (TI), 15 acute lymphoblastic leukemia (ALL) patients at presentation and 12 healthy controls.

Results: In all disease groups, an inverse linear correlation was shown between hemoglobin and logarhytmic sEpo level. The covariance analyses according to corrected hemoglobin levels exhibited the highest sEpo level in FA, followed by ALL, TI and iron deficiency anemia, sequentialy.

Conclusion: There was no statisticaly significant difference of sEpo levels in FA patients in terms of androgen treatment and this finding supports that androgen affects erythropoisis directly, and has no effect on erythropoietin. The results indicate that there is no erythropoietin deficiency in the anemia of these patients and the admnistration of exogenous erythropoietin offers no clinical benefit.