Dr Irina Savelieva, St George's Hospital, SGUL, UK
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In this free-access CardioEd resource from the recent Cardiology Update 2016 meeting organised by St George’s, University of London, Dr Irina Savelieva, cardiologist at St George’s Hospital, University of London, UK, talks about the challenges of using DOACs in everyday practice.

The Cardiology Update 2016 meeting focused on heart failure management and stroke prevention in patients with atrial fibrillation.

TRANSCRIPT

What are the challenges of using DOACs in everyday practice?
The most important issue when we see our patients with atrial fibrillation is to identify their risk of stroke as well as their risk of bleeding, and then to marry the two scores together, and to select an appropriate anticoagulant at the time of our first encounter with the patient.

I think that is the major challenge. And because now we are spoiled with regard to the selection of anticoagulants, RE the four DOACs that are now available to our patients, and to us as well – we now have to understand the slight differences between the agents, between the patient populations that have been addressed in the clinical trials and the subsequent registries, and apply this knowledge when selecting the appropriate DOAC for our patient.