Patients with severe aortic valve stenosis and impaired platelet function benefit from preoperative desmopressin infusion

What Was Tested

Researchers studied Vasopressin and Desmopressin in this randomized controlled trial publication.

Who Took Part

According to the abstract, 43 patients were involved.

By PubMed's age tags, the people studied were middle-aged adults, older adults and people over 80, both men and women.

Measurement of CADP-CT, factor VIII activity, von Willebrand factor antigen, GpIb binding activity, ristocetin cofactor activity, collagen-binding activity, and multimers were performed after induction of anesthesia, one hour after desmopressin infusion, and 24 hours postoperatively.

How the Study Was Run

The researchers set it up as a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study.

Because people in this Vasopressin study were split into groups at random, differences between the groups are less likely to reflect who happened to join each one.

Neither the patients nor the staff measuring them knew who was on Vasopressin, so expectations could not easily colour the readings.

A placebo (an inactive look-alike) gave the Vasopressin group a baseline to be compared against.

What Was Measured

Topics PubMed links to this paper include Aortic Valve Stenosis, Blood Platelet Disorders, Deamino Arginine Vasopressin, Echocardiography, Doppler, Heart Valve Prosthesis Implantation, Hemostatics and Hospital Mortality.

What This Means in Plain Language

The paper is a randomized, double-blind and placebo-controlled study of Vasopressin and Desmopressin in 43 patients.

The abstract goes on to report its results in about 4 sentences; this page does not restate them, so read the paper for the findings and their limits.

The publication is from 2011 (The Annals of thoracic surgery), a journal based in Netherlands.

More context: the Vasopressin compound page and the Desmopressin compound page, all human trials.