Tranexamic Acid in Patients Undergoing Noncardiac Surgery
(2022) New England Journal of Medicine — Vol. 386, n° 21, p. 1986-1997 (2022)
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- Authors
Devereaux, P.J. 
Leslie, Kate - et. al.
- Abstract
- BACKGROUND Perioperative bleeding is common in patients undergoing noncardiac surgery. Tranexamic acid is an antifibrinolytic drug that may safely decrease such bleeding. METHODS We conducted a trial involving patients undergoing noncardiac surgery. Patients were randomly assigned to receive tranexamic acid (1-g intravenous bolus) or placebo at the start and end of surgery (reported here) and, with the use of a partial factorial design, a hypotension-avoidance or hypertension-avoidance strategy (not reported here). The primary efficacy outcome was life-threatening bleeding, major bleeding, or bleeding into a critical organ (composite bleeding outcome) at 30 days. The pri- mary safety outcome was myocardial injury after noncardiac surgery, nonhemor- rhagic stroke, peripheral arterial thrombosis, or symptomatic proximal venous thromboembolism (composite cardiovascular outcome) at 30 days. To establish the noninferiority of tranexamic acid to placebo for the composite cardiovascular out- come, the upper boundary of the one-sided 97.5% confidence interval for the hazard ratio had to be below 1.125, and the one-sided P value had to be less than 0.025. RESULTS A total of 9535 patients underwent randomization. A composite bleeding outcome event occurred in 433 of 4757 patients (9.1%) in the tranexamic acid group and in 561 of 4778 patients (11.7%) in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 0.76; 95% confi- dence interval [CI], 0.67 to 0.87; absolute difference, −2.6 percentage points; 95% CI, −3.8 to −1.4; two-sided P<0.001 for superiority). A composite cardiovascular outcome event occurred in 649 of 4581 patients (14.2%) in the tranexamic acid group and in 639 of 4601 patients (13.9%) in the placebo group (hazard ratio, 1.02; 95% CI, 0.92 to 1.14; upper boundary of the one-sided 97.5% CI, 1.14; absolute difference, 0.3 per- centage points; 95% CI, −1.1 to 1.7; one-sided P=0.04 for noninferiority). CONCLUSIONS Among patients undergoing noncardiac surgery, the incidence of the composite bleed- ing outcome was significantly lower with tranexamic acid than with placebo. Although the between-group difference in the composite cardiovascular outcome was small, the noninferiority of tranexamic acid was not established. (Funded by the Canadian Insti- tutes of Health Research and others; POISE-3 ClinicalTrials.gov number, NCT03505723.)
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Citations
Devereaux, P. J., Marcucci, M., Painter, T. W., Conen, D., Lomivorotov, V., Sessler, D. I., Chan, M. T. V., Borges, F. K., Martínez-Zapata, M. J., Wang, C. Y., Xavier, D., Ofori, S. N., Wang, M. K., Efremov, S., Landoni, G., Kleinlugtenbelt, Y. V., Szczeklik, W., Schmartz, D., Garg, A. X., et al. (2022). Tranexamic Acid in Patients Undergoing Noncardiac Surgery. New England Journal of Medicine, 386(21), 1986-1997. https://doi.org/10.1056/nejmoa2201171 (Original work published 2022)