EPO and cerebrovascular disorder: Surprisingly, while EPO has been reported to be anti-inflammatory [19,20,38] and hs-CRP has been widely accepted as an important inflammatory biomarker for predicting prognostic outcome of cardiovascular and cerebrovascular diseases [4,6,7,9-11,14,15,31,32], serum hs-CRP levels at day 21 after IS did not differ between the patients with and those without EPO therapy.