People with atrial fibrillation (an irregular heart beat) are at an increased risk of forming a blood clot in the heart.

When the heart beats irregularly, it doesn’t pump blood as it should. This can cause blood to pool in the upper chambers of the heart (called the atria).

This pooling can cause a blood clot to form in in the heart. A clot in the heart can break away and travel directly to the brain. There, it can block an artery and cause a stroke. Doctors prescribe blood-thinning medicines, called anticoagulants, to stop these type of clots by targeting factors that blood needs to form clots.

Eliquis is one of the anticoagulants prescribed by doctors to help reduce the risk of stroke in people with AFib. However, while there are benefits to taking a blood thinner like Eliquis, there are also potentially life-threatening side effects.

What is Eliquis?

Eliquis (apixaban) was approved in 2012 to help prevent blood clots which may cause strokes in patients who have atrial fibrillation and was later approved to help prevent deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism.

Made by Pfizer and Bristol-Myers Squibb, Eliquis is one of a new generation of anticoagulants called direct thrombin inhibitors, along with Xarelto and Pradaxa. Like Xarelto and Pradaxa, Eliquis has been aggressively marketed as a superior alternative to warfarin (Coumadin), an older blood thinner, because they require less patient monitoring.

Benefits of Eliquis

Eliquis is a factor Xa inhibitor, a new generation anticoagulant that works by decreasing the clotting ability of the blood and helps to prevent harmful clots from forming in the blood vessels.

Eliquis is used for reducing the risk of stroke and serious blood clots in certain patients who have had a hip or knee replaced, or in people with atrial fibrillation, a common heart arrhythmia that afflicts millions of people in the United States.

Eliquis is also used to treat or prevent deep venous thrombosis, a condition in which harmful blood clots form in the blood vessels of the legs. These blood clots can travel to the lungs and can become lodged in the blood vessels of the lungs, causing a condition called pulmonary embolism. This medicine is used for several days after hip or knee replacement surgery while a patient is unable to walk since it is during this time that blood clots are most likely to form.

A large-scale trial published in the New England Journal of Medicine found that Eliquis is superior to warfarin for preventing stroke and systemic embolism in patients with atrial fibrillation. According to the study, when compared to warfarin, a very effective treatment to prevent stroke, Eliquis resulted in “an additional 21 percent relative reduction in stroke or systemic embolism.”

Eliquis has several major practical advantages over warfarin in addition to the therapeutic benefits, since it does not require monitoring and has few interactions with other medications or food.

Eliquis Risks and Side Effects

Several Eliquis side effects have recently come to light including increased bleeding and bruising. One of the real dangers of using Eliquis is that it belongs to a new family of anticoagulants that do not have reversal agents to stop their blood-thinning effects during a bleeding event. As a result, it is believed that Eliquis patients may be at risk for serious, irreversible internal bleeding.

Unlike the older anticoagulant warfarin, the effects of which can be reversed with common treatments such as Vitamin K, the maker of Eliquis has yet to develop an antidote to reverse the drug’s blood-thinning effects.