Great news has just been published. Tranexamic acid (TXA) has been proven effective at reducing deaths from head injuries by up to 20%. This was from a large, international, randomised, placebo- controlled clinical trial, involving over 12,000 patients from 179 hospitals in 29 countries. RoadPeace represented patients on the clinical trial, which showed that:

TXA is safe. It prevents bleeds from getting worse and, importantly, was not found to cause negative side effects. So there were no trade-off between survivability and quality of life.

TXA is cheap. Cost should not stop this life-saving drug from being widely used.

TXA will need to be used widely. There are well over a million head injuries a week around the world. Many are caused by road crashes, especially those involving children and young adults. With global road deaths failing to decline, despite all the efforts in the UN Decade of Action for Road Safety, news of TXA’s effectiveness should be warmly welcomed as it will be needed to help reach the Sustainable Development Goals which expect road deaths to be halved.

Even more good news, at least for Britain. TXA is already in the trauma care system. Hospitals are encouraged, even subsidised, to use TXA with other (non head) injury related bleeding. RoadPeace I shoping it should be relatively easy to get trauma guidelines updated and to extend the use of TXA to head injuries.

Time to treatment was found to be important. The sooner TXA is given, the better. This is the next challenge to be tackled.

People will never know their lives have been saved by the simple, timely administration of this low cost drug. But the research has shown that deaths will be avoided and families spared a lifetime of loss.

On behalf of all those crash victims and their families who will benefit from TXA, RoadPeace says thank you.

>> Find out more about the CRASH 3 trial

Updated on: 15 October 2019