This is meant as a brief revision of oral anticoagulant drug pharmacology. The college used these agents (and their relative novelty) against the candidates in Question 4 from the first paper of 2015. Specifically, the question was in part regarding the various advantages and disadvantages of these agents in the management of AF, which seems to be a very "physicianly" question. The other parts of it - more intersting to ICU trainees - were about testing to assess coagulation status, and managing life-threatening bleeding. Something similar appeared in Question 7 from the second paper of 2020, where the focus was rivaroxaban.
FOAM resources:
Non-FOAM resources, which still happen to be free and online:
Since Question 4 from the first paper of 2015 was written, we have had some new developments. Excellent overviews by Almegren (2017, free) and Cohen et al (2018, paywalled) are available, and have been integrated into the updated version of this article. The advent of the "broad spectrum" reversal agent ciraparantag (Galliazzo et al, 2018) is anticipated to significantly alter the character of this article, but at this stage it is not yet available for widespread use.
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