Antiemetic Fosaprepitant To Remedy Nausea and Vomiting

Description

Nausea and vomiting (NV) are common and interrelated conditions. Approximately 50% of adults experience nausea in a given year while 30% of adults experience vomiting over the same period. Of this population of symptomatic individuals with NV, 25% of patients seek care in any healthcare delivery setting. Health Care Utilization Project (HCUP) data indicates that nearly 9.0 million patients seek care for NV in emergency departments (EDs) each year in the United States.

Antiemetics are used to treat NV. Antiemetics currently utilized in the emergency department setting for NV do not always work on the first dose and have a plethora of side effects because of their peripheral mechanism of action outside of the vomiting reflex pathway in the central nervous system. These medications include ondansetron, promethazine, metoclopramide, olanzapine, haloperidol. Chief among these side effects is alteration of an aspect cardiac electrical signaling called the QT segment which represents the duration of ventricular contraction and relaxation. The QT segment is prolonged with commonly used antiemetics which can often be a prelude to cardiac dysrhythmias that are associated with mortality. As a result, patients with NV often have long length-of-stay (LOS) involving supportive care with intravenous fluids or empiric treatment with medications that can potentiate development of cardiac dysrhythmias. This is a problem in busy emergency departments (EDs) struggling to accelerate patient throughput in order to appropriately keep up with patient volume in an under-supplied hospital bed environment nationally.

Fosaprepitant and its active metabolite aprepitant are a relatively new class of antiemetic that exclusively acts in the central nervous system by blocking neurokinin (NK-1) which is a key signaling molecule in the centrally mediated aspects of the vomiting reflex. Currently, fosaprepitant and aprepitant both have only two United Stated Food and Drug Administration (USFDA) approved indications for nausea and vomiting: chemotherapy-induced and postoperative. Neurokinin inhibitors are highly effective and generally well-tolerated. Therefore, this class of medication may be a more appropriate medication for the millions of patients with nausea and vomiting that seek care in EDs. Intravenous fosaprepitant is converted to the active metabolite aprepitant on the order of minutes and is significantly cheaper to procure at this time.