Newer Blood Thinner Brilinta Exceeds Plavix For Cardiac Bypass Surgery Patients

Newer Blood Thinner Brilinta Exceeds Plavix For Cardiac Bypass Surgery Patients.
In a probationary comparing two anti-clotting drugs, patients given Brilinta before cardiac ignore surgery were less tenable to die than those given Plavix, researchers found bonuses. Both drugs check platelets from clumping and forming clots, but Plavix, the more popular drug, has been linked to potentially chancy side effects in cancer patients.

In addition, some people don't metabolize it well, making it less effective worldmedexpert.com. "We did welcome about a 50 percent reduction in mortality in these patients, who took Brilinta, but without any broaden in bleeding complications," Dr Claes Held, an associate professor of cardiology at the Uppsala Clinical Research Center at Uppsala University in Sweden and the study's pass researcher, said during an afternoon jam conference Tuesday.

So "Ticagrelor (Brilinta) in this setting, with acute coronary syndrome patients with the aptitude need for bypass surgery, is more effective than clopidogrel (Plavix) in preventing cardiovascular and outright mortality without increasing the risk of bleeding". A danger with any anti-platelet dull is the risk of uncontrolled bleeding, which is why these drugs are stopped before patients undergo surgery.

Held was scheduled to put forth the results Tuesday at the American College of Cardiology's annual meeting in Atlanta. For the study, Held and colleagues looked at a subgroup of 1261 patients in the Platelet Inhibition and Patient Outcomes (PLATO) trial. The researchers found that 10,5 percent of the patients given Brilinta extra aspirin before surgery had a courage attack, pulse or died from heart disease within a week after surgery. Among patients given Plavix with aspirin, 12,6 percent had the same adverse outcomes.

Patients taking Brilinta had a unmitigated death rate of 4,6 percent, compared with 9,2 percent for patients taking Plavix. In addition, the cardiovascular finish rates were 4 percent among patients taking Brilinta and 7,5 percent amidst those taking Plavix. When Held's team looked at each group individually, they found no statistically significant adjustment for heart attack and stroke and no significant difference in major bleeding from the bypass operation itself. The two drugs undertaking in different ways.

Plavix needs the body to convert it to an active form, which poses some problems. Last week, the US Food and Drug Administration required Bristol-Myers Squibb and Sanofi Aventis, the makers of Plavix, to tote a "black box" counsel to the drug's label, alerting doctors and patients that some patients cannot fully modify the drug, so it may be less effective for them. Brilinta, which is in a personal class of drugs, does not rely on metabolic conversion, so it acts faster and clears the body faster than Plavix. This enables quicker rescue of normal platelet function, the researchers say.

But Held can't illustrate the difference in the rate of death. "That's the billion dollar question. Right now we don't take the mechanism. We see the difference in mortality, but we cannot untangle it in differences in bleeding so there has to be some other effect explaining the difference".

The PLATO study was funded by AstraZeneca, the maker of Brilinta. Results of another turn over presented at the meeting Tuesday found that the drug Tekturna (aliskiren) given to patients after a pith attack did not improve heart function as researchers had hoped.

In that trial - called the Aliskiren Study in Post-MI Patients to Reduce Remodeling (ASPIRE) - Tekturna, which blocks the hormone renin, was given to patients along with reciprocal blood pressure-lowering drugs. But the researchers found it provided no additional advantage in guts function and only served to raise potassium levels and cause low blood pressure.

So "Morbidity and mortality tarry high in patients following heart attack, with a substantial tally of patients subsequently developing heart failure," Dr Scott D Solomon, supervisor of noninvasive cardiology at the Brigham and Women's Hospital, Harvard Medical School in Boston and pilot researcher, said in a statement. "We hoped that this study would generate the information needed to representation a major morbidity and mortality trial.

However, our results show that the addition of aliskiren to standard therapy in high-risk post-MI patients does not act upon left ventricular size or function found it for you. These findings suggest the require for caution when treating post-heart attack patients".