Patients who took an anticoagulant alone after a minimally invasive aortic valve replacement developed hidden clots on the new valve at roughly half the rate of patients taking aspirin alone, according to a randomized trial published in JAMA and presented at the European Society of Cardiology Congress in Munich.
The finding runs against the direction clinicians have been trained to lean. Current guidance discourages routine anticoagulation after transcatheter aortic valve implantation for patients without an independent reason to take one, largely out of concern about bleeding. In this trial, the bleeding concern did not materialize as expected.
