Overtreatment for Afib - warfarrin - may increase risk of Alzheimer's

<[alzheimersnewstoday.com]

Quote

The scientists adjusted their traditional stroke and bleeding risk factors, and observed that the patients with an International Normalized Ratio (INR) measurement above 3, which is an abnormally slow blood clotting level, in more than a quarter of the monitoring tests, had more than double the probability of developing dementia, when compared with other than patients whose tests revealed overtreatment in no less than 10 percent of the time.

“Even at skilled centers, it’s very common to have INR outside the ideal range up to 40 percent of the time, and over the years there may be an accumulative negative impact on cognitive ability,” Bunch said. “If your INRs are consistently too high, for stroke prevention your doctor may want to consider switching you to one of the newer anti-clotting drugs that is easier to regulate or a device placed into the heart that prevents clots from forming or exiting the area in the heart chamber where most clots develop in people with atrial fibrillation.”

Hi George, This is with regards to combination therapy.

From article
"in combination with antiplatelet treatments aspirin or clopidigrel".



Edited 1 time(s). Last edit at 01/26/2015 07:59PM by researcher.

Hi researcher,

The initial study was done in combined warfarin- Clopidegrel or aspirin anti-platelet combined 'dual therapy' but the message learned also applied to out of range warfarin use as well over an excessive time in higher and/or lower Than therapeutic INR ranges.

Basically their findings suggest that it's very important to make every effort to confirm as much time spent within the therapeutic INR window of 2 to 3 as possible to actually take warfarin as safely as possible and reduce any added risk of either embolic or hemorrhagic event sources ... Even from the accumulation of such silent cerebral events from either embolic or bleeding origin, and their possible increasing contribution toward dementia over time.

Weekly monitoring with carefully calibrated home INR meters is a great way to significantly improve time within therapeutic INR over the long term ... As we reported in the last two AFIB Report issues in referencing these same core research done at Intermountain Heart center in Utah.

Cheers!
Shannon

Researcher / Shannon --

Thanks for clarifying the original post.

/L

Several months ago, 60 minutes had a feature regarding a study of people that live into their 90's including brain scans, quality-of-life and post mortem brain section studies. I think it is germane to this topic as there are some revealing results when it comes to alzheimers and strokes.

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