Medical Faculty News v25i1

and recommendations in clinical practice guidelines including the Australian Therapeutic Guidelines, and are expected to guide and improve the future management of acute agitation in emergency settings in Hong Kong and abroad. Dr Chan’s work on anticoagulation medicines was motivated by the fact that emergency rooms see a lot of patients with bleeding due to these medications, which are often prescribed to reduce the risk of stroke. She embarked on population-based cohort studies on oral anticoagulants – and found that gastroprotective agents could reduce the risk of gastrointestinal bleeds, which is a common concern in people taking anticoagulation medications. This has led to recommendations in clinical practice guidelines and changes in clinical practice. She continues to work on the most frequently used newer anticoagulation medications (dabigatran, apixaban, rivaroxaban and edoxaban) to discover more about their effectiveness and safety profiles. She also studied the data of men and women patients being treated for atrial fibrillation by the Hong Kong Hospital Authority and found that newer oral anticoagulants could be more effective and safer, especially for women patients. Although warfarin was the most commonly used drug, Dr Chan and her team found that women who were prescribed a newer treatment, non-vitamin K antagonist oral anticoagulant, had a further reduced risk of bleeding in the brain compared with warfarin. The same effect was not seen in men. “Big data is now an important part of the work we do. While clinical trials have its merits, they are resource intensive and you may only work with a few hundred or perhaps thousands of patients. With the good quality data we have in Hong Kong, we can look at tens of thousands of patients and in a way mimic clinical trials. And we can do this more efficiently and look at multiple clinical outcomes concurrently,” she said. 11 Medical Faculty News