Pradaxa

Dec. 6 (Bloomberg) -- Boehringer Ingelheim GmbH’s blood- thinning pill Pradaxa may provide a more convenient alternative to the standard therapy for potentially deadly clots, researchers said after a study comparing the two medicines.

Pradaxa prevented clots in the legs and lungs as effectively as the generic drug warfarin with no increased risk of major bleeding, a complication of anti-clot treatments, according to a study published online today by the New England Journal of Medicine and presented at the American Society of Hematology conference in New Orleans. Boehringer’s drug posed a lower risk than warfarin of bleeding in general.

Newer medicines like Pradaxa and Xarelto from Bayer AG and Johnson & Johnson don’t require the regular checks that warfarin does to ensure patients are getting the right dose. The need for regular monitoring has left doctors wary of prescribing the older treatment for more than six months to a year.

The Boehringer pill “is a far more convenient drug,” since levels in the body don’t react with foods and other medicines the way warfarin does, researchers led by Sam Schulman, a professor in the department of medicine at McMaster University in Hamilton, Ontario, wrote in the study.

Pradaxa reduced the risk of bleeding by 29 percent compared with warfarin, the study showed. Twenty of the 1,274 patients who took Pradaxa experienced major bleeding, compared with 24 of the 1,265 patients who took warfarin.