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  Elie Akl

By ELLEN GOLDBAUM

Published: March 1, 2012

A UB faculty member has played an important role in the development of new, national guidelines for the prevention and treatment of blood clots—deep vein thrombosis and pulmonary embolism—that have been published by the American College of Chest Physicians.

Elie A. Akl, associate professor of medicine, family medicine and social and preventive medicine in the schools of Medicine and Biomedical Sciences and Public Health and Health Professions, participated in developing the new, evidence-based guidelines published earlier this month, titled “Antithrombotic Therapy and Prevention of Thrombosis, 9th ed: American College of Chest Physicians Evidence-Based Clinical Practice Guidelines.

Akl is an expert in guideline methodology and evidence-based medicine, in which the best available evidence from peer-reviewed scientific data is applied to the clinical care of patients.

He served on the five-member executive committee of the guideline and contributed to 10 of the 24 peer-reviewed papers reporting these guidelines. He also was the editor on two of the most important papers on treatment of clots and the treatment of stroke.

The guidelines include more than 600 recommendations for the prevention, diagnosis and treatment of thrombosis, addressing a comprehensive list of clinical conditions. The guidelines also include a stronger focus on risk stratification of patients, which suggests clinicians should consider a patient’s risk for a blood clot before they administer or prescribe a prevention therapy.

“These guidelines will set the standards for the field of guideline development,” says Akl.

“The key advances are the use of a systematic, explicit and transparent methodology for grading the evidence and developing recommendations,” he explains, “and the explicit and quantitative consideration of patient values and preferences, the restriction of outcomes to only those deemed to be important for patients and the use of a novel policy for the management of conflicts of interest.”