Duration of Dual Anti-Platelet Therapy in Acute Coronary Syndrome Image Coronary heart disease causes the most deaths worldwide and happens when small fatty lumps (plaques) build up, narrowing the blood vessels supplying the heart. If the plaques become disrupted a small blood clot can form reducing the flow of blood and oxygen to part of the heart muscle - and this sometimes leads to a heart attack or chest pains (acute coronary syndrome). The standard treatment after an acute coronary syndrome is to give two blood thinning drugs. This dual anti-platelet therapy helps the fatty lumps heal in order to stop the heart attacks happening again - but thinning the blood can also raise the risk of bleeding. Several trials have shown that taking dual anti-platelet therapy does help stop heart attacks, but it’s not clear how long dual anti-platelet therapy should last to maximise this benefit but minimise the risk of serious bleeding. Recent evidence suggests that giving dual anti-platelet therapy for a shorter time is better because the risk of serious bleeding, or even death, is higher the longer it is given. We want to test long and short durations of dual anti-platelet therapy in a UK and International trial of 18,318 heart attack patients to settle this unanswered clinical question once and for all. Patients will be recruited from hospital wards and those who decide to take part will get (at random) dual antiplatelet therapy for either 3 months or 12 months. Patients do not need to do anything else for the study but we’ll look at their health records so we can collect data about their health to see which works best. Patients have been involved in the development of this study and will be involved in looking at progress of the study. Chief Investigator: Professor David Newby Number and location of participating sites (by region/ country): 21 sites in Scotland, 100 sites in England, 7 sites in New Zealand EudraCT number: 2016-003596-22 Clinical Trials.gov reference: NCT03252249 Funder: British Heart Foundation Start and End Date of Grant: 01 August 2017 – 31 July 2022 Start and End Date of Recruitment: April 2018 – April 2021 Current status: recruiting If you are a participant and wish to withdraw from the study for any reason, please call 0131 242 6515. Due to the study stopping before completion, the number of participants is lower than initially planned. The study recruited over 4500 people in the UK. UK GDPR Privacy Statement: If you have participated in this study and would like to read how it complies with UK GDPR, please read this document. Document ECTU DUAL-ACS GDPR Privacy statement (839.38 KB / PDF) Sponsor: ACCORD http://accord.scot/ Chief Investigator: Professor David Newby, Chancellor’s Building, 49 Little France Crescent, Little France, Edinburgh, EH16 4SB; e-mail: d.e.newby@ed.ac.uk Trial Manager: Dr Laura Forsyth ECTU Involvement: Trial management / Statistics / Data base and randomisation service provision (UKCRC) This article was published on 2024-09-24
