PATIENTS WITH ARTIFICIAL BUT NOT BIOLOGICAL HEART VALVE PROSTHESIS PRESENT A HYPERCOAGULABILITY RELATED TO THE INTENSITY OF ANTICOAGULATION

Long term anticoagulant therapy is mandatory for patients with artificial heart valve prosthesis and is suggested for some patients with biological heart valve prosthesis. Oral anticoagulants reduce but not abolish thromboembolic complication in these patients. They act lowering the level of vitamin K-dependent coagulation factors and that in turn should result in a depression of "in vivo" thrombin formation. Fibrinopeptide A (FpA) is a good marker of thrombin formation and therefore we ascertained in several occasions the thrombin formation in 43 patients with artificial and 18 with biological heart valve prosthesis, all the patients being on oral anticoagulant treatment at least from 1 year. FpA was significantly higher in patients with artificial (determinations n = 138) with respect to biological (n=73) heart valve prosthesis (p 0.01). The FpA level in biological valves was close to that obtained in 22 not anticoagulated healthy subjects. When we divided FpA values in artificial heart valves according to the intensity of anticoagulation, we obtained a decreasing FpA mean levels with the increase of the degree of anticoagulation. In particular FpA values with an INR 4.5 were close to values obtained in healthy subjects. These data support the concept that patients with artificial heart valves are at higher risk of thromboembolism and therefore the intensity of anticoagulation should be different with respect to biological valves and probably a little higher than that recommended at the Leuven Consensus Conference.