Clinical Drug Experience Knowledgebase

For patients with severe and symptomatic valvular heart disease, valve replacement surgery improves morbidity and mortality outcomes. It is estimated that four million valve replacement procedures have been performed over the last 50 years and it remains the only definitive treatment for most patients with advanced heart valve disease.1 Patients who received mechanical heart valves (MHV) had a significantly lower mortality, higher cumulative incidence of bleeding and, in some age groups, stroke than did recipients of a biologic prosthesis. In addition, MHV demands lifelong anticoagulation with vitamin K antagonists (VKA), most commonly warfarin, due to the high thrombogenicity of the prosthesis. Even with the appropriate use of therapy, there is a high incidence of thromboembolic events: 1% to 4% per year. Furthermore, bleeding risk is significant, ranging from 2% to 9% per year.4 Indeed, variability in the international normalized ratio (INR) is a major independent predictor of reduced survival in patients with MHV.5 Due to the narrow therapeutic index, interactions, genetic variants, and need for blood monitoring of patients taking VKAs, alternatives to warfarin have now been made available: specifically, inhibitors that directly target Factor IIa (dabigatran) or Xa (rivaroxaban, apixaban, edoxaban).6 RE-ALIGN was a prospective, randomized, phase 2, open-label trial that randomized 252 patients within a 2:1 unblinded fashion to either dabigatran or warfarin, with patients stratified according to interval since replacement (within three to seven days in population A; >three months in population B). Unfortunately, the trial was terminated prematurely because of an excess of thromboembolic and bleeding events among patients in the dabigatran group. The negative results of this study can be explained by the selection of 50 ng/mL as the target dabigatran trough level, the possibility of this drug inducing downstream effects on the coagulation cascade that impair its ability to blunt the postoperative hypercoagulable state relative to warfarin and the inclusion of early postoperative patients (population A) since it is a phase of high incidence of thromboembolic events.

On the other hand, rivaroxaban has already been tested in experimental9 and animal models10 with encouraging results. According to these findings, the investigators hypothesized that a direct Factor Xa inhibitor could be evaluated in patients with MHV for prevention of thromboembolic events.