Researchers have developed a tool to more precisely assess stroke risk in people with atrial fibrillation (A-Fib).
The researchers’ findings demonstrated that “adding blood tests to an existing risk calculator can help physicians better determine who truly needs blood thinners—powerful drugs that prevent strokes but can also cause dangerous bleeding.”
A-Fib is “the most common arrhythmia that makes the top chambers of the heart quiver instead of pumping normally. The blood inside the heart moves more slowly, and this pooling of blood can lead to blood clots.” Those clots can then be “ejected by the heart to the brain – causing stroke.” Blood thinners, or anticoagulants, make it harder for the blood to clot, but “some people who take anticoagulants experience a breakthrough stroke anyway, with the medications potentially causing dangerous side effects related to uncontrolled bleeding.”
Conventional stroke risk calculators do “not account for heart dysfunction, accelerated blood clotting, and inflammation, which are all important risk factors for stroke.” The new risk calculator developed by these researchers adds results from the blood test to the calculation. A study found that adding data from two specific blood tests increased the ability of the calculator to predict a stroke.
