One in Five Kidney Dialysis Patients Given Wrong Blood Clotting Drug, Study Finds

More than 20 percent of kidney dialysis patients who have surgery to open a clogged artery are given the wrong kind of blood clotting medicine, increasing the chances of life-threatening bleeding, according to a new study.

Researchers from the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center said the results of their study indicate doctors may be ignoring warning labels on blood clotting drugs and putting patients at risk of death or serious injuries, according to an ABCNews.com report.

Medication errors are blamed for more than 100,000 deaths in the United States each year, the report said. Most of those deaths result from drugs which are prescribed to patients who could be injured by them.

The new study examined two blood thinners, Lovenox (enoxaparin) and Integrilin (eptifibatide), which are not recommended for use in kidney dialysis patients because such people are more likely to suffer adverse reactions to blood thinners, which are released from the body through the kidneys.

Thousands of Dialysis Patients Studied

Researchers examined more than 22,000 dialysis patients who were treated at 829 hospitals from January 2004 to August 2008. The patients underwent percutaneous coronary intervention, a surgery that involves inserting a tube inside a clogged artery to open the vessel.

They found that more than 22 percent of the patients were given a blood thinner that is not recommended for kidney dialysis patients. As a result, the patients had nearly twice the number of major bleeding events in hospital and “significantly” more deaths.

“This study therefore demonstrates that these medications are used in clinical practice despite (U.S. Food and Drug Administration) FDA-directed labeling, and their use is associated with adverse patient outcomes,” the team wrote, according to ABCnews.

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