INR test
If you are currently on warfarin your doctor may request for a PT/INT test or you may see one of your relatives getting done a PT/INR test. But what is it? You may wonder. Warfarin is an anticoagulant mainly given to patients who at increased risk of the development of intravascular blood clots. For this discussion we will restrict our patient category to patients with prosthetic heart valves. Patient with prosthetic heart valves at increased risk of development of blood clots. These clots can cause various catastrophic events. E.g.: strokes, Myocardial infarctions, Peripheral vascular disease and etc. To reduce this an anticoagulant is given. But this has side effects. Major side effect of our interest is excessive bleeding. To balance this risk and benefit anticoaguability of the warfarin PT/INT test is used. Actually the PT part is the test. PT is the abbreviation for prothrombin time. INR means international normalized ratio. Due to diversity of the chemical manufacturers different laboratories get different result for the PT test. But the manufacturer of that particular chemical compound gives the data to convert it to the universally accepted INR. This value doesn’t change from the laboratory. So is a single patient’s blood checked by two laboratories the INR test value should be equal.
INR test PT/INR test
