Hey, welcome back to the Real Life Pharmacology podcast. This is Eric Christensen pharmacist.

And today we're going to cover Apixaban, which is an anticoagulant brand name Eloquist.

And starting off with its mechanism of action, this drug inhibits the clotting factor 10A.

Now clotting factors are kind of what they sound like.

They're very, very important in the clotting cascade and the formation or production of a blood clot.

So these drugs inhibit that production of a blood clot,

which can obviously be good in certain situations where we've got a clot

that causes a stroke or causes a DVT, for example, or a PE, pulmonary embolism,

these drugs can help prevent that and or treat that in certain situations.

So when we go through that mechanism, the obvious downside or potential for concern is that we

thin out the blood and thin it too much. So bleed risk is a big, big concern with any

anticoagulant.

This one is a newer, somewhat newer, anti-coagulant,

maybe five, ten years old now at this point,

but in comparison to Warfarin, obviously, is a much, much newer agent.

That leads to the potential downside of cost issues.

So these drugs are much, much more expensive as far as just the pill compared to warfarin.

Unique advantages.

Okay, so why would we, in a patient with atrofibulation, at risk for

a thromboemolic stroke, why would we use these drugs instead of warfarin if they're more

expensive? So, the really nice thing about these, this drug in particular, and I'll talk about some of the others like

riveroxaban on an upcoming podcast but with a pixaban and the others these drugs have a stable dose

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