Can Schizophrenia Benefit From Anemia Treatment?

One never knows where valuable new treatments for schizophrenia might come from. Take, for instance, erythropoietin, a hormone secreted by the kidneys that increases the rate of production of red blood cells.

Hannelore Ehrenreich, M.D., a psychiatrist with the Max-Planck Institute for Experimental Medicine in Goettingen, Germany, and colleagues believe that it might constitute a safe and effective new treatment for the negative symptoms of schizophrenia, which are not countered well by the antipsychotic medications on the market.

In essence, they reported in the January Molecular Psychiatry, erythropoietin has been used for a number of years to treat anemia in people with chronic kidney failure and has been found to be safe. What’s more, cognitive improvement has been noted in kidney-failure patients after they receive erythropoietin. And now this research group has found that when erythropoietin is injected into the bloodstream of either humans or test animals, it is able to get into their brains; that receptors for erythropoietin are densely expressed in the cortex and hippocampus of schizophrenia subjects; and that peripherally injected erythropoietin enhances cognitive function in mice in conjunction with an aversion task involving cortical pathways presumably impacted by schizophrenia.

Ehrenreich told Psychiatric News that she and her team have launched a multicenter study to test, for example, whether erythropoietin could be given to schizophrenia patients in conjunction with their usual antipsychotics.

An abstract of “Erythropoietin: A Candidate Compound for Neuroprotection in Schizophrenia,” is posted online at www.nature.com/cgi-taf/DynaPage.taf?file=/mp/journal/v9/n1/abs/4001442a.html. ▪