Critically ill patients in the hospital are at high risk for developing venous thromboembolism (VTE). The 2011 PROTECT trial compared the two most common drug strategies used to prevent VTE — unfractionated heparin (UFH) and dalteparin, a low-molecular-weight heparin (LMWH) — and found no difference between the two groups in the primary endpoint of the trial, leg deep-vein thrombosis.
But PROTECT did turn up a significant reduction in the dalteparin group in the important secondary endpoints of pulmonary embolism (PE) and heparin-induced thrombocytopenia (HIT). Now a prespecified economic analysis of PROTECT, published in JAMA, indicates that use of LMWH, though it is more expensive than UFH, may lead to lower hospital costs due to the reduction in PE and HIT.
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