Can pharmacogenetics help patients under chronic treatment with coumarin anticoagulants?

Abstract

Abstract Vitamin K antagonists are highly effective antithrombotic drugs. However, appropriate dosing is difficult to establish owing to its narrow therapeutic window as well as widespread inter- and intra-individual variability in dosage. Compared with dosing solely based on clinical information, pharmacogenetics can help improve the therapy with coumarins by decreasing the time to reach a stable dose and reducing the risk of bleeding. Most of the studies about genotyping of patients using vitamin K antagonists have focused on predicting the stable dose. Two genes have been shown to have the most influence on dosing: