( Findings Illustrate Role of Innovative ...)Mircera Effective in Stabilising Haemoglobin Levels in Elderly,Patients With Kidney Disease on Dialysis,Health

BASEL, Switzerland, April 23, 2007 /PRNewswire/ -- A new Roche Phase III analysis shows once-monthly MIRCERA, a continuous erythropoietin receptor activator, effectively treats renal anaemia in one of the fastest growing groups of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD) -- elderly patients who are on dialysis. In this analysis, MIRCERA treatment kept Hb levels stable, deviating less than 0.5 g/dL from start of the trial in patients over age 65 with a simplified dosing schedule. The data were presented today at the World Congress of Nephrology (WCN) in Rio de Janeiro.

"These results show that MIRCERA safely and effectively treated a group of kidney disease patients who represent the 'face' of dialysis and also have the poorest prognosis," said Marializa Bernardo M.D., Southwest Nephrology Associates, Houston, Texas, who presented the data. "Elderly dialysis patients are fragile because they suffer from a range of coexisting diseases along renal anaemia that worsen their health, impact their quality of life and increase their risk of hospitalization and death. This analysis shows that those elderly patients on dialysis who were directly converted from treatment given up to three times a week to MIRCERA twice monthly or once monthly maintained stable haemoglobin levels."

The prevalence of CKD patients on dialysis is projected to grow 7 per cent per year and it is estimated that by 2010, there will be over 2 million people worldwide on dialysis.(i)

These results, based on a pooled analysis from two large MIRCERA Phase III maintenance studies, evaluated patients age 18 and older that are representative of the real world dialysis population. The mean age of patients included in the analysis was 60 years of age (however more than 40 per cent of patients were over age 65) and patients had a
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