Blood-thinning drugs may reduce dementia risk in people with irregular heartbeats

Conclusion If you’ve been diagnosed with AF and you have been prescribed anticoagulant treatments such as warfarin or clopidogrel, we already know they protect you against having a stroke. This study suggests they may also help to protect you against dementia. Cutting the risk of dementia for people who have a raised risk because of AF would be an exciting step forward. Unfortunately, we can’t tell from this study whether the protection against dementia was down to the anticoagulants, because of the possible effect of unmeasured confounding factors. Usually, we would want to see a randomised controlled trial (RCT) to follow this study, to find out if anticoagulant drugs really do have that effect. However, because people with AF are usually prescribed anticoagulants to reduce their risk of stroke, it would not be ethical to do an RCT, as it would leave people unprotected against stroke when a known preventive treatment is available. Because of the difficulties of carrying out a proper trial, we will need to see more studies of the kind done here, in different populations, to see whether the results hold true. It would be useful in future studies to have clearer information about which confounding factors are being taken into account. There are a few things we don’t know from this study. The researchers were unable to differentiate between types of AF. Some people have just one episode of AF that doesn’t return, or goes away with treatment, while others have persistent...
Source: NHS News Feed - Category: Consumer Health News Tags: Neurology Source Type: news