Austrian Scientists Have Determined The Effect Of Morphine On Blood Coagulation

Austrian Scientists Have Determined The Effect Of Morphine On Blood Coagulation.
Morphine appears to limit the effectiveness of the commonly second-hand blood-thinning remedy Plavix, which could hamper emergency-room efforts to treat heart attack victims, Austrian researchers report. The decision could create serious dilemmas in the ER, where doctors have to weigh a affection patient's intense pain against the need to break up and prevent blood clots, said Dr Deepak Bhatt, management director of interventional cardiovascular programs at Brigham and Women's Hospital Heart and Vascular Center, in Boston. "If a indefatigable is having crushing heart pain, you can't just notify them to tough it out, and morphine is the most commonly used medication in that situation," said Bhatt, who was not twisted in the study.

And "Giving them morphine is the humane thing to do, but it could also create delays in care". Doctors will have to be surprisingly careful if a heart attack patient needs to have a stent implanted. Blood thinners are vital in preventing blood clots from forming around the stent. "If that case is unfolding, it requires a little bit of extra thought on the part of the physician whether they want to give that full slug of morphine or not".

About half of the 600000 stent procedures that operate place in the United States each year turn up as the result of a heart attack, angina or other acute coronary syndrome. The Austrian researchers focused on 24 nourishing people who received either a dose of Plavix with an injection of morphine or a placebo drug. Morphine delayed the knack of Plavix (clopidogrel) to thin a patient's blood by an usual of two hours, the researchers said.

The painkiller also delayed the body's absorption of Plavix and decreased blood levels of the narcotize by about half. It further seemed to diminish the effectiveness of the medication in breaking up blood clots. Although the den showed an association between morphine and diminished effectiveness of Plavix, however, it did not make good a cause-and-effect relationship. "Co-administration of morphine and Plavix should likely be avoided, if possible," the researchers said.

Their findings were published online Dec 4, 2013 in the Journal of the American College of Cardiology. This budding medicate interaction is not well known, and Bhatt said dirt of these findings needs to be distributed as soon as possible. "The first step would be awareness. I don't imagine many doctors are going to ever think of this potential interaction". Bhatt said he isn't worried about heart attack victims who are taking Plavix prior to their cardiac episode, because the drug already will be built up in their bloodstream.

The living souls with the most potential for harm are those not taking Plavix who are in the middle of a heart attack and need both disquiet relief and an immediate high level of the blood thinner in their system. One option to get around this interaction is to get the self-possessed into a catheterization lab as soon as possible to treat the source of the pain rather than using morphine to dull the pain. Doctors might also use other blood-thinning drugs, said Dr Gregg Fonarow, a spokesman for the American Heart Association.

Although Plavix is a substantially hand-me-down therapy, many medications have been shown to interfere with its ability to act. "More powerful antiplatelet agents - prasugrel Effient and ticagrelor Brilinta - are now on tap for treatment of patients with acute coronary syndromes and do not have the same type of drug interactions," said Fonarow, who is also a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles. Bhatt, however, said he is disturbed that morphine might have the same purpose on these other blood thinners. "I think there's a reasonable chance the same happening might occur with both those agents box4rx.com. We need further research".