1. Introduction

Anticoagulant drugs directly or indirectly influence coagulation factors and thus inhibit the initiation and progress of coagulation and fibrin-clot formation. They are classified into two groups according to the mode of application, namely parenteral and oral drugs. Among the latter, vitamin K antagonists (most often warfarin) were the only available oral anticoagulants and were widely used for almost a century. In recent years, new oral anticoagulant drugs became available that directly target either factor IIa or Xa [1].

This chapter provides an overview of both parenteral and oral anticoagulant drugs used in clinical practice with a description of the mode of action and management of therapy in different clinical settings.

© 2016 The Author(s). Licensee InTech. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and eproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited. © 2018 The Author(s). Licensee IntechOpen. This chapter is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/3.0), which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
