Erythropoietin:
a new tool for muscle disorders?
Medical Hypotheses, 2004
C.
Scoppetta, F. Grassi (E-mail
address: ciriaco.scoppetta@uniroma1.it (C.
Scoppetta).)
The main action
of erythropoietin (EPO) is to regulate the production of red cells. However
both experimental evidence and clinical experience suggest that erythropoietin
has a positive effect on skeletal and cardiac muscle. Mice lacking EPO or its
receptors suffer from hearth hypoplasia and have a reduced number of
proliferating cardiac myocytes. EPO receptors are expressed on mouse primary
satellite cells and in cultured myoblasts, and their stimulation appears to
enhance proliferation and reduce the differentiation of both cell types.
Moreover EPO is capable of promoting angiogenesis in muscle cells, which
provides an additional route to increase oxygen supply to active muscles. In
men, the effects of EPO on muscle cells are suggested by the illegal use of EPO
by agonistic and amateur athletes to enhance their performances. In some
athletes EPO improved their long-duration muscular performances much more than
expected on the basis of the increment of the blood hemoglobin alone. Our
proposal is to investigate the effect of EPO treatment in various animal models
of muscular dystrophies (MD), which are common hereditary primary muscle
disorders characterized by muscle damage and wasting, to date without any
effective treatment. The ability of EPO to induce the proliferation of
satellite cells in the presence of differentiating conditions, typical of the
damaged muscle, may represent a tool to expand the cellular population
competent for muscle repair. This would lengthen the period when muscles can be
efficiently repaired. In the presence of positive results, the possibility
could be considered of selecting some of the human forms of MD and treating the
patients with EPO.