![]() ![]() Interaction with food and drugs: Warfarin interacts with a variety of foods, (such as large amounts of vitamin K containing foods, cranberry juice, avocados, grapefrjuits, antibiotics, drugs affecting the central nervous system, and cardiac medication, alcohol or antibiotics) (8), which means that extra care is needed with the use of the drug.Age and gender: Garcia et al (7) showed that, in addition to age, gender has an impact on the required dose of Warfarin for anticoagulation, suggesting that the initial target dose for anticoagulation in the elderly may be overstated, particularly in elderly women.Another longitudinal study (6) demonstrated a 21% decrease in the required dose for a period of 15 years. One study (5) included 2,305 patients and showed that the dose required for treatment fell by 0.5 mg per decade of life. Unpredictable response: Within each individual, and especially among elderly individuals, Warfarin has an unpredictable response studies also show that the dose required to achieve appropriate levels of anticoagulation can be smaller with advancing age.However, apart from patient's risk of bleeding when using it, Warfarin has several shortcomings: Warfarin's efficacy in preventing embolic events in patients with atrial fibrillation (AF) has been proven and its mechanism understood (3,4). It has been widely used in heart and vascular medicine ever since (Warfarin is a portmanteau word combining WARF the accronym of Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation and adin, the ending from word Coumadin) (1,2) Although the drug initially found commercial application as a killer of rats and mice in 1941, it was approved in 1954 and among its first recipients was President Dwight Eisenhower, as he recovered from a heart attack in 1955. He identified a substance with anti-clotting properties he named dicoumarol. Karl Paul Link a biochemist, got funding from the Wisconsin Alumni Research Foundation to research sweet clover disease which was known to cause the cattle to bleed to death after ingesting spoilt sweet clover. In his truck, he had also brought a dead young cow and some clover hay he wanted to know what had killed his cow and spoilt his hay. During the Great Depression in Wisconsin, a farmer presented at a school of agriculture with a milk can full of blood which would not coagulate.
0 Comments
Leave a Reply. |