A recent study published in The New England Journal of Medicine, says that moderately ill patients, with these anticoagulants or blood thinner drugs, had a 4 percent increased chance of survival until discharge without requiring organ support.

The study reported that moderate COVID- 19 patients who received therapeutic-dose anticoagulation with unfractionated or low molecular-weight heparin were 27 percent less likely to require cardiovascular respiratory organ support, such as intubation.

According to the study authors:

“The 4% increase in survival to discharge without needing organ support represents a very meaningful clinical improvement in these patients.”

The research work involved 2,200 patients

“If we treat 1,000 patients who are hospitalized with COVID-19 with moderate illness, an additional 40 patients would have meaningful improvement in clinical status.”

Participating platforms for the study, which defined moderately ill patients as those who did not need intensive care unit-level support, included Antithrombotic Therapy to Ameliorate Complications of COVID-19 (ATTACC); A Multicenter, Adaptive, Randomized Controlled Platform Trial of the Safety and Efficacy of Antithrombotic Strategies in Hospitalized Adults with COVID-19 (ACTIV-4a); and Randomized, Embedded, Multifactorial Adaptive Platform Trial for Community-Acquired Pneumonia (REMAP-CAP).

Comparisons of the three platforms are included in the supplementary appendix, which is available on NEJM.org along with the full text of the study.

In a parallel trial published in The New England Journal of Medicine, researchers discovered that therapeutic-dose anticoagulation did not benefit critically ill patients.

Image Credit: GEtty