Factor Xa antagonists are used increasingly frequently for prevention and treatment of venous thromboembolic events stroke systemic emboli in patients with non-valvular atrial fibrillation. Individual characteristics patient, a need prolonged or life-long treatment, concomitant diseases, the use other drugs interacting anticoagulants increase risk side effects anticoagulation. We analyzed curre...

Purpose: The Wells rule is widely used for clinical assessment of patients with suspected deep vein thrombosis (DVT), especially in the secondary care setting. Recently a new clinical decision rule for primary care patients (the primary care rule) has been proposed, because the Wells rule is not suffi cient to rule out DVT in this setting. The objective was to compare the ability of both rules ...

PURPOSE The Wells rule is widely used for clinical assessment of patients with suspected deep vein thrombosis (DVT), especially in the secondary care setting. Recently a new clinical decision rule for primary care patients (the primary care rule) has been proposed, because the Wells rule is not sufficient to rule out DVT in this setting. The objective was to compare the ability of both rules to...

BACKGROUND Anticoagulation management services (AMSs) are widely used for anticoagulation management in many countries. Our AMS is a pharmacist-run ambulatory clinic with a physician advisory committee that manages patients referred with complicated anticoagulation histories. This paper assesses the adequacy of anticoagulation, rates of anticoagulant-related events and associated health care re...

PURPOSE We present a rare case of late-onset migraine-like visual aura triggered by a large aneurysm in the left extracranial internal carotid artery. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first case of migraine-like visual aura triggered by an extracranial internal carotid artery (ICA) aneurysm. This is also the first case of migraine-like visual aura with probable thromboembolic trigger b...

INTRODUCTION Atrial fibrillation is the most common chronic arrhythmia in clinical practice, which is associated with a well known increased thromboembolic risk. The use of oral anticoagulants in this context is well established. However, there are some gaps in information that warrant further studies, such as the duration of an atrial fibrillation event that is long enough to increase the risk...

BACKGROUND AND OBJECTIVES Vitamin B12 dependent methionine synthase (MS) regulates de novo production of methionine from homocysteine (Hcy). Since moderate elevations in Hcy are considered vasculotoxic, we examined a common variant (A2756G-MS) of the gene coding for this enzyme as a risk for thromboembolism. DESIGN AND METHODS We investigated A2756G-MS and folate/thiol status in 51 individual...

BACKGROUND Venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a complex multifactorial disease influenced by genetic and environmental risk factors. An example for the latter is the regular use of combined oral contraceptives (CC), which increases the risk to develop VTE by 3 to 7 fold, depending on estrogen dosage and the type of progestin present in the pill. One out of 1'000 women using CC develops thrombosis,...

OBJECTIVES Thromboembolic events are the major factor affecting the prognosis of patients with chronic kidney disease (CKD). Haemostatic alterations are possible causes of these complications, but their roles remain poorly characterised. In the prospective observational study, we investigated the entire coagulation process in patients with CKD to elucidate the mechanisms of their high thromboem...

BACKGROUND Patients taking anticoagulants orally over the long term have international normalized ratios (INRs) outside the individual therapeutic range more than one-third of the time. Improved anticoagulation control will reduce hemorrhagic and thromboembolic event rates. To gauge the potential effect of improved anticoagulation control, we undertook to determine the proportion of anticoagula...