Patients undergoing coronary stent placement who don't fill their blood thinner prescriptions could have a much higher risk of death.
Researchers found that 30 percent of stent patients did not start taking Plavix within three days of hospital discharge as directed, HealthDay reported. Neglecting to take the medication could triple these patients' risk of heart attack and quintuple their risk of death over the following month.
"What was surprising was the fact that almost a third of patients experienced some sort of delay and that any delay, even by a day, appeared to be associated with some increased risk," study author Doctor Nicholas Cruden, a consultant cardiologist at Edinburgh Heart Center of the Royal Infirmary of Edinburgh in Scotland, said in the news release.
"This highlights the difficulties patients often experience with medication on the transition from hospital to community and the importance of compliance with anti-platelet treatment after coronary artery stenting, particularly in the early period following implantation," Cruden said.
Stents are "small mesh tubes" that are used to hold open plaque-filled arteries, they are implanted into about 454,000 Americans every year.
Patients who received metal stents are urged to take blood thinners along with aspirin for about a month after the completion of their surgery. Patients who were given drug-eluting stents (which are coated in medication that prevents further artery blockage) are prescribed the medication regimen for between six and 12 months.
"A person coming in for a stent usually spends a night in the hospital and goes home the next morning. Then they may not see their physician for two to three weeks. In that period . . . realizing the value of every drug that has been prescribed sometimes gets lost," Dr. Alpesh Shah, an interventional cardiologist at Houston Methodist Hospital, told HealthDay.
The researchers suggests that stent patients be released from the hospital with enough medication to last that first crucial month.
"In the United Kingdom, we routinely discharge patients with a supply of anti-platelet drugs to cover the immediate 'at-risk' period following stent implantation," Cruden said. "One month would seem like a sensible starting point."
