Abstract:
Background: Warfarin has a narrow therapeutic index, poor adherence by patients due to lack of
knowledge leads to severe side effects. Therefore, understanding the patient's knowledge and
timely education about warfarin are crucial for successful warfarin management. Even though,
knowledge of warfarin was widely studied among patients, its level is unknown among the
patients in Sri Lanka.
Objective: To determine the knowledge of warfarin and its association with socio-demographic
factors among the patients on warfarin attending the Cardiology Clinic, teaching hospital
Anuradhapura
Methods: A descriptive cross-sectional study was conducted at the cardiology clinic of teaching
hospital Anuradhapura. Data were collected using an interviewer-administered questionnaire. As
per the Zahid et al. 2020 study, for each question, ‘1’ mark was awarded for each correct answer
and ‘0’ for each wrong answer. Final scores were presented as a percentage of correct answers for
all the participants in the study. A cut-off >50% was considered as an adequate knowledge score.
The association of knowledge with socio-demographic factors was analyzed by using the Chi
squared test in SPSS version 25.0.
Results: The study included 390 participants with a 93.85% response rate. Among the
participants, the majority (54.1%) were in the age group of 58-87 years with a female
predominance (61.5%). Among the total participants, most respondents (86.6%) had adequate
knowledge about warfarin use and its outcomes, while 13.4% had inadequate knowledge. A
significant majority, 91.3%, had adequate knowledge about INR regulation while 8.7% had
inadequate knowledge. Results revealed that the educational qualifications of the participants were
associated with higher knowledge levels of warfarin (p=0.017) although it was not influenced by
other factors such as age (p=0.449), gender (p=0.866) or duration of therapy (p=0.162).
Conclusions: Level of education had a statistically significant association with patient's
knowledge and the majority of participants had adequate knowledge about warfarin treatment.
Age, gender, and duration of the warfarin treatment did not indicate a significant association with
warfarin.
