Prospective Observational Study of the Direct Oral Anticoagulants Periprocedural Management

When an anticoagulated patient is scheduled for surgery or an invasive procedure, the physician's worry is how to achieve needing an optimal haemostasis without increasing the risk of thrombosis. For decades, the main drug for chronic anticoagulation has been antivitamin-k (warfarin or acenocoumarol). In the majority of patients, the periprocedural management proposal has been stopping the drug and giving a short acting anticoagulant for some days before surgery, known as bridging therapy strategy, mostly done with a low-molecular weight heparin (LMWH).

The debate about the best perioperative management of the anticoagulated patients has increased with the arrival on the market of direct oral anticoagulants (DOAC), by the moment approved for long-term anticoagulation in patients with atrial fibrillation and for the treatment of pulmonary embolism. DOAC could be classified in two groups: direct inhibitors of thrombin (the only current available drug is dabigatran) and direct inhibitors of factor Xa (rivaroxaban, apixaban, edoxaban, and others soon to come). DOAC have pharmacokinetic characteristics that seem to favour stopping the drug for some days without substitution in the vast majority of the patients. Nevertheless, current lack of experience in the management of high doses of DOAC during the perioperative period, the absence of effective antagonists to reverse the anticoagulation, the unsuitable standardized laboratory monitoring and, also, the different pharmacokinetics between patients receiving these drugs, have made challenging to standardize the optimal management in the perioperative period. Some proposals have been published in last years from expert consensus, based on pharmacokinetic data, but DOAC short time of commercialization and the difficulties to interpret the post-hoc analysis from the randomized trials, for the heterogeneity of the included population and the wide kind of surgeries, most of them with low bleeding risk, have moved the spanish working group on perioperative management of haemostasis to plan a multi-institutional registry to gain experience and information in the periprocedural (urgent or scheduled) management of DOAC.

The authors designed an observational, prospective, multicentre study including patients under long-term DOAC treatment for atrial fibrillation or treatment of venous thromboembolism who are scheduled or need an urgent procedure. Data collected were demographic, related with the DOAC management and with the possible haemorrhagic or thrombotic events with a follow-up of 30 day. A univariable analysis and a multivariate regression model were applied using all the available co-variables. Bilateral hypothesis contrast were considered significant if α < 0.05.