Tranexamic Acid – a Recipe for Saving Lives in Traumatic Bleeding

Using kitchen scales, carefully weight out 4 kg of rice and pour it into a deep saucepan. Now put your hands into the rice and let the grains run between your fingers. Contemplate carefully each grain. The number of grains (about 140,000) is approximately the number of lives that could be saved each year world-wide if all hospitalized trauma patients with significant bleeding were treated with tranexamic acid (TXA) within 3 h of injury. TXA is cheap and widely available. All that is needed to reap these human benefits is that doctors use it. That TXA is a potent inhibitor of fibrinolysis which was first reported by Okamoto and Okamoto in The Keio Journal of Medicine in September 1962. Since then TXA has been widely used to treat heavy menstrual bleeding and to reduce