Low molecular heparin for cancer-associated venous thromboembolism – still the “CATCH of the day“?

In December 2014 the CATCH study was presented at the annual meeting of the American Society of Hematology. CATCH is a randomized controlled trial comparing the low molecular weight heparin tinzaparin with warfarin for 6 months extended treatment (=secondary prophylaxis) of cancer-associated venous thromboembolism (VTE). 6.9 % of patients in the tanzaparin arm experienced recurrent symptomatic and asymptomatic VTE compared with 10 % in the warfarin arm, this difference was statistically not significant. However, comparing only symptomatic VTE tinzaparin was significantly better. There was no difference in the incidence of major bleeding events, but significantly fewer patients experienced clinically relevant non-major bleeding with tinzaparin than warfarin. The CATCH study is so far the largest study on extended treatment of cancer-associated VTE. It supports the guideline recommendation that low molecular weight heparins should be preferred to vitamin K antagonists for anticoagulation of cancer-associated VTE....