Going by a somewhat disquieting report in the Journal of the American Medical Association, December 9 issue, more than one-fifth of the kidney dialysis patients who undergo angioplasty are given ‘wrong’ blood thinners - including Sanofi-Aventis’ Lovenox (enoxaparin) and Merck Schering-Plough’s Integrilin (eptifibatide).

As per the recent report, the wrongly prescribed medication tends to increase the chances of considerable bleeding during the hospital stay of these patients, and may even put them at a much higher risk of dying.

Using data from 829 US hospitals on 22,778 dialysis patients between January 2004 and August 2008 who underwent percutaneous coronary intervention, researchers found that overall, 5,084 patients, or 22.3 percent, got a wrong blood thinner.

With the US Food and Drug Administration (FDA) having already determined that neither Lovenox nor Integrilin should be used in people undergoing dialysis, the findings of the report clearly indicate that a number of US doctors are openly ignoring the warnings on drug labels; thereby putting their patients at the risk of grave harm and even death.

Commenting on the findings, Dr. Thomas Tsai of the Denver Veterans Affairs Medical Center said: “The results of this study illustrate the problem of medication errors in the United States, as well as the need to make patient safety a priority on the health care agenda.”