Grant: Fellowship Award: Focus on Stroke

The motive of this proposed research is to promote safe medication use and to advocate shared decision-making in medical practice. At the moment, we have plenty of data on emerging blood-thinning drugs in stroke prevention for patients with AF. However, clinical decisions on most appropriate therapy cannot be made because there has not been any direct comparison made among those drugs. This is potentially dangerous as the misuse of new therapies may lead to increased bleeding incidence without much benefit in stroke risk reduction. By utilizing novel statistical modeling, the result of this research will fill this knowledge gap and allow clinicians to communicate the expected risk and benefit with each of the new blood-thinning therapies to patients. This is crucial in the shared decision-making model (medical decision made jointly by physicians and patients together) as the result of proposed analysis will incorporate the patient’s preference on benefit-harm trade-offs. The implication of having patients involved in choosing their medication regimen with physicians is a better quality of prescribing, improved compliance to the chosen therapy and decreased incidence of bleeding associated with blood-thinning drugs in patients with AF. The result of the proposed research will not only permit direct comparisons of different blood-thinning agents used for stroke prevention in patients with AF, it will also provide a unique opportunity to assess and evaluate a risk-benefit tool which has the potential to be applied to other therapeutic areas in cardiovascular diseases. It could provide the standard for assessing costly pharmacotherapeutic approaches by funders and decision-makers.