Bleed or Die: A Current Literature Review on Patients Receiving Anticoagulation Therapy

Background: Advances in the field of medical science and dental science, have increased the average life span of general public, and due to which geriatric medicine and dentistry is becoming important in today’s world. As part of this we dentist come across these group of patients very often and there are unique challenges in dealing with these group of patients, as majority of them will have compromised medical history and one which is important is patients with the history cardiac and cerebrovascular diseases, as these patients will be on anticoagulant and antiplatelet drug therapy. So when these patients visit a dentist it becomes very difficult in deciding on whether to stop the drugs and put the patient at life threatening risk of thromboembolism, are to continue the drugs and put the patient at risk of minor bleeding. In this article we have conducted a small survey amoung general dentist and done current literature review on patient receiving these drugs.