How often are parenteral anticoagulants administered by parents?

Abstract

Parenteral anticoagulants are a class of anticoagulants that need to be administered non-orally, usually by injection or infusion. There are a variety of such agents, but heparin reflects the most frequently used. Being alerted to an error in a prior publication in which the word "parenteral" was inadvertently replaced by the word "parental," it became clear that even experienced authors make such errors, which could then remain undetected by reviewers and editors, thus leading to failure in correction of same before publication. Given this is likely to be a somewhat ongoing error, we undertook a PubMed search of the literature to identify that "parentally administered" anticoagulants, as well as "parental" administration of other compounds, seems to be evident throughout the literature. We hope this report acts to raise awareness and help avoid similar errors in the future.

Keywords: anticoagulants; heparin; injections; low molecular weight heparin; parent.