“…In this scenario, a large body of evidence has pointed out the efficacy of the hormone erythropoietin (EPO) as neuroprotectant. Although peripherally administered recombinant human EPO (rHuEPO) has shown to penetrate the blood-brain barrier (BBB) and reduce brain injury following a variety of insults (Brines et al, 2000;Digicaylioglu and Lipton, 2001;Grasso et al, 2004), its potential neuroprotective efficacy in an in vivo model of experimental TBI has been scarcely investigated (Brines et al, 2000;Lu et al, 2005;Ozturk et al, 2005;Shein et al, 2005;Siren et al, 2006;Verdonck et al, 2007;Yatsiv et al, 2005). Evidence shows widespread efficacy of rHuEPO in injury models of spinal cord (Celik et al, 2002;Gorio et al, 2002;Grasso et al, 2006), subarachnoid hemorrhage (Buemi et al, 2002a,b;Catania et al, 2002;Grasso, 2001;Grasso et al, 2002a,b;Springborg et al, 2002), retina, and the heart damage (Calvillo et al, 2003;Junk et al, 2002).…”