Background:
Standard administration of newer oral P2Y
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inhibitors, including prasugrel or ticagrelor, provides suboptimal early inhibition of platelet aggregation (IPA) in ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI) patients undergoing primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI). We sought to investigate the effects of cangrelor, tirofiban and prasugrel, administered as chewed or integral loading dose, on IPA in patients undergoing primary PCI.
Methods:
The FABOLUS-FASTER is an investigator-initiated, multicenter, open-label, randomized study. A total of 122 P2Y
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-naïve STEMI patients were randomly allocated (1:1:1) to cangrelor (n=40), tirofiban (n=40), both administered as bolus and 2h infusion followed by 60 mg of prasugrel, or 60 mg loading dose of prasugrel (n=42). The latter group underwent an immediate 1:1 sub-randomization to chewed (n=21), or integral (n=21) tablets administration. The trial was powered to test 3 hypotheses (non-inferiority of cangrelor compared with tirofiban using a non-inferiority margin of 9%, superiority of both tirofiban and cangrelor compared with chewed prasugrel and superiority of chewed prasugrel as compared with integral prasugrel; each with alpha of 0.016) for the primary endpoint that was 30-minute IPA at light transmittance aggregometry (LTA) in response to 20 μmol/L adenosine diphosphate (ADP).
Results:
At 30 min, cangrelor did not satisfy non-inferiority compared with tirofiban, which yielded superior IPA over cangrelor (IPA: 95.0±8.9 vs. 34.1±22.5; P<0.001); cangrelor or tirofiban were both superior to chewed prasugrel (IPA: 10.5±11.0, P<0.001 for both comparisons), which did not provide higher IPA over integral prasugrel (6.3±11.4; P=0.47), despite yielding higher prasugrel's active metabolite concentration (ng/ml; 62.3±82.6 vs 17.1±43.5; P=0.016).
Conclusions:
Cangrelor provided inferior IPA compared with tirofiban; both treatments yielded greater IPA compared with chewed prasugrel which led to higher active metabolite concentration but not greater IPA compared with integral prasugrel.
Clinical Trial Registration:
clinicaltrials.gov NCT02978040, and EudraCT 2017-001065-24