Assessment of PFA-100 system for the measurement of bleeding time in oral surgery

The common diagnostic methods to know primary hemostasis have been classified as invasive, depending on the operator, difficult to reproduce and at times not very reliable. Thus, different systems have been proposed to assess bleeding time, one of them being the PFA-100 device, which we present in this paper. Compare specificity between the traditional Ivy method with the PFA-100 system to measure bleeding time. We obtained a sample of 33 patients between the age of 24-80 years receiving anti-platelet treatment who needed to undergo oral surgery. Bleeding time was obtained by the Ivy method, an INR by an analysis done on the same day and a Coagucheck one hour before surgery as well as measurement of bleeding time with the PFA-100 system. Mean value of bleeding time through the Ivy method was 406.36 sec.. Mean bleeding time with the PFA-100 system for the collagen/epinephrine cartridge was 226.91 sec. and for the collagen/ADP cartridge was 110.27 sec.. All these values were within normality. We observed very high standard deviations with the Ivy method and more regular ones for the PFA-100 system, indicating its greater specificity. We also obtained a large correlation between collagen/epinephrine cartridge and acetylsalicylic acid. We found greater specificity of the analyzer of PFA-100 platelet function for the measurement of bleeding time in relationship with the traditional Ivy method.