Local pain due to subcutaneous erythropoietin (EPO) injection into the thigh was studied using a verbal score ranging from 0 to 4. Equivoluminous doses of epoetin-alpha (Cilag) and epoetin-beta (Boehringer) were compared in 2 controlled single-blind experiments: 10 dialysis patients were treated at random for 4 weeks at consecutive sessions with both brands of EPO, and 40 patients were treated in 1 session only with the 2 brands simultaneously. Pain scores were 1.12 +/- 0.28 versus 0.15 +/- 0.06 (p less than 0.05) and 1.75 +/- 0.19 versus 0.08 +/- 0.04 for epoetin-alpha and epoetin-beta, respectively (p less than 0.001). Treatment acceptance was 48% for epoetin-alpha versus 83% for epoetin-beta (p less than 0.05).
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Veys et al. (2008) studied this question.