Serum Hepcidin Levels as Indicator of Anemia Status in Male Hemodialysis Patients

Background: Hepcidin is a polypeptide hormone as regulator of iron homeostasis, and it plays an important role of functional iron deficiency in patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) which associated with hemodialysis (HD) because of defective erythropoiesis in CKD. This study was conducted to assess the association between hepcidin and anemia status in HD patients. This was a cross-sectional study of 65 HD patients and EPO therapy were enrolled; compared with 25 age matched healthy individuals as controls. The current study was investigated serum hepcidin, iron status was included serum ferritin and iron levels, anemia hematological indices such as RBC, Hb, MCV, and MCH, in addition to other clinical parameters of kidney function, and C-reactive protein (CRP) as inflammation markers were performed in both HD patients and controls. Results: The mean patient age was (45.65±13.34) years, with dialysis vintage of median (IQR) was (12 (3-36) month. serum hepcidin were highly significantly increase in HD patients than in the control group (622.3±139.6, and 465.16±80.31pg/ml, respectively p = 0.0001). serum hepcidin significantly associated with 37% anemia severity about (692.4±119.8) pg/ml more than patient with 49.2% of moderate about (605.3±117.7) pg/ml, (p=0.007) as compared with 13.8% of mild anemia groups (531.8±99.12) pg/ml, (p=0.001)