Self-Monitoring: Why Coagulation Monitoring

Coagulation monitoring is necessary!

Some people's bodies have a particular tendency towards the production of blood clots. This can occur, for instance, in patients who have had an artificial cardiac valve surgery. As the blood circulates, these clots may detach from their origin and occlude vessels throughout the body, resulting in e.g. occlusion of a leg artery or even a stroke. Oral Anticoagulation treatment using drugs called Vitamin K antagonists or Coumarin derivatives suppresses the undesirable formation of these blood clots by thinning the blood.

Among the most important aspects of this treatment is the need to maintain the right dosage and hence the proper fluidity of the blood. Too little dosage may not be effective in preventing clots and may lead to thrombosis, i.e blood is too thick, but too much can cause an excessive thinning of the blood and result in bleeding complications. Therefore a precise adjustment of the drug intake will allow you to stay within a defined therapeutic range, measured by PT/INR, which supports your therapy success.

A diagnostic test, which measures Prothrombin Time (PT), determines the coagulability of your blood. The result is called your "PT value" and is expressed in the international standard unit "INR" (International Normalised Ratio), which simply allows an easier comparison with PT measurements made using different reagents and instruments, which are laboratory, doctor's office and country dependent. INR is specific for each individual person and may vary greatly for the same drug intake, due to different individual and external factors. Factors such as other drugs, illness, nutritional intake, alcohol, stress and climatic variations during travel may interfere with patient's INR values and cause results to be outside of the therapeutic range.

Coagulation levels must therefore be checked at regular intervals, so that any adverse circumstances can be detected early on, allowing the Healthcare Professional to adapt the drug dosage accordingly, resulting in a patient being adequately protected.