The objective is to perform a descriptive analysis evaluating the correlation of Intra-cerebral hemorrhage (ICH) and blood thinners from a large national Electronic Medical Record (EMR) database.

Anticoagulants and anti-platelets carry higher risk of bleeding which may contribute to prevalence of ICH. With newer studies and trials, the use of dual anti-platelets (DUAP) and novel oral anticoagulants (NOACs) like apixaban and rivaroxaban is anticipated to increase.

Stroke patients were extracted using ICD-9/10 codes from the Cerner’s Health Facts® database for years 2000 to 2016. This database contains more than 62 million subject records including demographics, comorbidities, medical history, laboratory data, and in-hospital procedural data from over 600 US hospitals. Data acquisition was performed by the clinical and translational science center (CTSC) at university of New Mexico health sciences center (UNM-HSC). Patients with the diagnosis of hemorrhagic stroke having medication data were included in the final analysis.

A total of 627,567 patients (18 years and above) were identified with diagnosis of stroke. Among them, 80,469 (12.8%) patients were diagnosed with ICH. Total of 46,926 patients who had baseline medication data available, were included in the final analysis. Total 67.2% were not any antithrombotics, 8.3% were on aspirin only, 4.2% on clopidogrel, 4.1% on DUAP with aspirin and clopidogrel, 7.6% on warfarin only, 0.2% on apixaban, and 0.5% on rivaroxaban.

Approximately, 33% of the patients with ICH were on at least one blood-thinner medication. This is a descriptive analysis depicting a comparable rate of ICH in patients on DUAP compared to clopidogrel only. NOAC use correlated with an extremely low percentage of patients with ICH.