Daniel Singer, MD, of the Massachusetts General Hospital Clinical Epidemiology Unit, the report's lead author, was quoted as saying, "This comparative effectiveness study gives us more information about which atrial fibrillation patients are most likely to benefit from carefully administered warfarin therapy." He explained that by assessing warfarin within a "real world" practice setting, the study provides a more contemporary assessment of the therapy's overall effects than do older clinical studies.

Singer added, "One of our distinctive findings is that stroke risk continues to increase in patients age 85 and older and that warfarin provides substantial net protection for these elderly patients. A caution is that all these patients were presumably judged by their physicians to be reasonable candidates for warfarin therapy, so these results do not automatically apply to all elderly atrial fibrillation patients."

SOURCE:  Annals of Internal Medicine, September 1, 2009

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