Search   :       Oral Anticoagulants - Recommendations to promote their increased use to prevent ischemic stroke   Atrial fibrillation (AF), a heart flutter, is dangerous because blood pools in the heart, forming clots that can lead to deadly strokes. A recent study by Dutch doctors recommends greater use of oral anticoagulants to prevent strokes in people with a common heart arrhythmia Current guidelines recommend that AF patients be treated with drugs to stop this happening, but many doctors are wary of using the anticoagulant pills because they are difficult to monitor and can lead to uncontrolled bleeding. That physician caution may be costing lives, Ron Pisters and colleagues at the University Hospital Maastricht told the annual European Society of Cardiology congress. A retrospective study of 1,120 patients admitted with ischemic stroke to their hospital between 2003 and 2006 showed 163 had AF, of which 89 were diagnosed with the condition before admission. Yet only 44 patients in this group, or 49 percent, had received guideline anticoagulant therapy. Pisters estimated that correct medication could have prevented 25 out of the 89 cases of stroke, although, on the down side, there may have been five more cases of cerebral hemorrhage due to excessive bleeding. Nonetheless, his study concluded that five times more strokes would be prevented than cases of hemorrhage. The current mainstay of anticoagulant treatment is warfarin, which is sold by several generic drugmakers and by Bristol-Myers Squibb under the brand name Coumadin. A number of pharmaceutical companies, however have new products in development that appear to reduce significantly the bleeding risk seen with warfarin. Rivals in the race to produce a better oral anticoagulant include Bayer, Eli Lilly and Co and privately owned German drugmaker Boehringer-Ingelheim. The increased risk of bleeding in these patients on oral anticoagulants and their longer drug half lifes have been the main reasons for the race to find simpler alternatives with less risk of bleeding and shorter half lifes. Easy reversibility of the effect of these anticoagulants would be another alternative to promote the wide spread use of these drugs. The drug companies should work on this aspect as well.       © Copyright 2008 Ample Life Support Services.