Document Type

Article

Publication Date

2021

College/Unit

School of Pharmacy

Department/Program/Center

Clinical Pharmacy

Abstract

Current American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association guidelines for stroke or ST-elevation myocardial infarction recommend the use of oral vitamin K antagonists (VKAs) as a first-line anticoagulant. Although several studies have compared the use of direct oral anticoagulants (DOACs) to VKAs for left ventricular thrombus (LVT) anticoagula- tion therapy, they are small scale and have produced conflicting results. Thus, this meta- analysis was performed to aggregate these studies to better compare the efficacy and safety of DOACs with VKAs in patients with LVT. Cochrane Library, Google Scholar, MED- LINE, and Web of Science database searches through January 10, 2021 were performed. Eight studies evaluating stroke or systemic embolism (SSE), six studies for LVT resolution, and five studies for bleeding were included. There were no statistically significant differ- ences in SSE (OR 0.89; 95% CI 0.46, 1.71; p = 0.73; I2 = 45%) and LVT resolution (OR 1.13; 95% CI 0.75, 1.71; p = 0.56; I2 = 1%) between DOAC and VKA (reference group) ther- apy. DOAC use was significantly associated with lower bleeding event rates compared to VKA use (OR 0.61; 95% CI 0.40, 0.93; p = 0.02; I2 = 0%). DOACs may be feasible alterna- tive anticoagulants to vitamin K antagonists for LV thrombus treatment. Randomized con- trolled trials directly comparing DOACs with VKAs are needed.

Source Citation

Kido K, Ghaffar YA, Lee JC, Bianco C, Shimizu M, Shiga T, et al. (2021) Meta-analysis comparing direct oral anticoagulants versus vitamin K antagonists in patients with left ventricular thrombus. PLoS ONE 16(6): e0252549. https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0252549

Comments

Copyright: © 2021 Kido et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited.

This article received support from the WVU Libraries' Open Access Author Fund.

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