Patients with thrombotic disorders may often be subjected to a blood thinning treatment. In this treatment, oral anticoagulation along with warfarin and similar drugs are possibly recommended. Investigators from the University of Manchester suggest a vital breakthrough and simplification in regulating oral anticoagulation.
The outcome of present day blood thinning treatment seems to depend on the safety and effectiveness of the drug-induced coagulation defect. While too little anticoagulation appears ineffective, excess can lead to dangerous bleeding. In order to gauge the safety of this treatment, a prothrombin time (PT) blood tests are apparently performed on every patient at frequent intervals. The acquired results are seemingly provided with international normalised ratios (INR). Believed to be based on PT standardization, INR system is a primary biological standard for thromboplastin. However, the current method appears as a more simplified local INR derivation and at the same time successfully maintains safety and effectiveness of the INR system.
Professor Leon Poller, leading the European Action on Anticoagulation (EAA), added, “The aim of the WHO Scheme has been to make the treatment safe and effective on a world scale by providing a reliable international system for blood testing and reporting of results as INR. In recent years, the WHO Scheme has proved increasingly difficult to apply not only because of its heavy demands but because the manual PT testing procedure on which it is based has increasingly been replaced by automated systems of measurement. These automated PT systems as well as differing from manual PT testing may vary in INR results on the same patient’s blood specimen and even coagulometers of the same manufacture and may give different INR results on the same patient’s blood. As a result of the difficulties, the INR system has become increasingly difficult to apply at the local level and has been falling into disfavour.â€
The method was tested at 28 experienced centres for around 5 years. As a result, the simplified method of INR derivation seemingly employing the unique PT/INR Line showed INR reliable plasmas. Scientists also pointed out that unlike INR derivation, the PT/INR Line is not dependable on almost entirely discarded manual PT testing for traditional WHO ISI calibration and INR interpretation. This newly developed method may be way easier to derive INR as compared to conventional WHO thromboplastin calibration.
The research is published in Clinical Chemistry.