Balancing ESA and iron therapy in a prospective payment environment

Ever since the introduction of EPO, ESAs and iron dosing have been driven by financial incentives. When ESAs were a profit center for providers, large doses were used. With ESAs becoming a cost center, a new trend has appeared, gradually replacing their use with iron to achieve the same therapeutic effect at lower cost. This financially driven approach, treating ESAs and iron as alternatives, is not consistent with human physiology where these agents act in a complementary manner. It is likely that we are still giving unnecessarily large doses of ESAs and iron, relative to what our patients' true needs are. Although we have highlighted the economic drivers of this outcome, many other factors play a role. These include our lack of understanding of the complex interplay of the anemia of chronic disease, inflammation, poor nutrition, blood loss through dialysis, ESAs and iron deficiency. We propose that physiology-driven modeling may provide some insight into the interactions between erythropoiesis and ferrokinetics. This insight can then be used to derive new, physiologically compatible dosing guidelines for ESAs and iron.