Rapid exclusion or confirmation of heparin-induced thrombocytopenia: a single-center experience with 1,291 patients.

Background: The current gold-standard for diagnosing heparin-induced thrombocytopenia is the detection of platelet-activating antibodies by means of functional assays which, since they are time consuming and not widely available, are not suited to guiding acute treatment decisions. The objective of our study was to assess the ability of more rapid immunoassays to predict the presence of functionally relevant anti-platelet factor 4/heparin-antibodies.

Design And Methods: We analyzed 1,291 of 1,383 (93.