ticagrelor for Coronary Artery Disease

With the widespread use of clopidogrel, resistance to clopidogrel has been attracting increasing attention, and emerged as a new challenge adversely affecting patients clinical risk and outcome. Clopidogrel resistance means that blood platelets show little or no response to clopidogrel. It is closely associated with increased risk of serious cardiovascular events, seriously affects the prognosis of patients, and brings difficulties to clinical treatment. Guideline recommendations on the use of dual antiplatelet therapy have been formulated that ticagrelor 90 mg twice daily plus aspirin in preference to clopidogrel 75mg daily plus aspirin for ACS patients. Recent study found that ticagrelor 90mg twice a day orally could significantly reduce the occurrence of clopidogrel resistance and adverse cardiovascular events. The previous studies have reported that half-dose ticagrelor had the similar inhibitory effect on platelet aggregation as the standard-dose ticagrelor, which was significantly stronger than that in the clopidogrel group. But it is still not very clear that the effect of low-dose ticagrelor on platelet function in patients with clopidogrel resistance and coronary heart disease. Therefore, we performed this randomized, single-blind clinical trial to observe the effects of low-dose ticagrelor and double standard-dose clopidogrel on platelet aggregation and prognosis in clopidogrel resistance's patients with coronary heart disease.