BOSTON (Reuters):

Juicing up the body's blood supply with the Johnson & Johnson drug Procrit can reduce the risk of death in critically ill trauma patients by nearly 60 per cent, researchers reported on Wednesday.

But the findings, published in the New England Journal of Medicine, are not strong enough to recommend the drug as a routine treatment in hospital intensive care units, other experts said.

The team led by Dr. Howard Corwin of the Dartmouth-Hitchcock Medical Center in New Hampshire gave the drug, also known as epoetin alfa, to critically ill patients because they are known to be at high risk for anaemia, the lack of red blood cells that Procrit is designed to treat.

Traditionally, anaemia is treated with transfusions of red cells. After one month, 3.5 per cent of the 402 trauma patients who received Procrit once a week for up to three weeks had died, compared to 6.6 per cent of the 391 given a placebo instead.

Yet the drug had little or no benefit for 331 patients in the intensive care unit who were not treated for trauma, regardless of whether they underwent surgery.

"It is unclear whether this is because the study was underpowered for nontrauma patients or whether in fact only certain subgroups within the medical or surgical populations have a benefit," the researchers wrote.

The drug company paid for the study, which included 115 medical centres.