Warfarin Institute of America
Dedicated To Your Health
EVENING PRIMROSE OIL AND WARFARIN
Can you take evening primrose oil with warfarin?
This is a very interesting question for which there is no certain
answer. I
can find no references in the National Library of Medicine where any
medical
journal has had even one article where anyone was harmed by this
combination. Yet most of the sites on google say that evening
primrose oil
could increase the effect of warfarin.
So we have the following possibilities:
1. There is no harmful effect
2. Everyone heeded the warning and nobody ever took the combination
3. The warnings say it "could", so maybe it does not.
So what should you do?
If you were taking the evening primrose daily before you started
warfarin it should make little difference. This is because the
increased effect of warfarin would be apparent right from the
beginning. While you are being tested to determine your dose, it
would be found that you need a lower dose
of warfarin that if you were not taking evening primrose. The key to
warfarin therapy is consistency. If you skip days of the evening
primrose and it does have an effect on warfarin, you will find that your
INR (test of
how warfarin is working) will go up and down reflecting whether you are
taking evening primrose or not. So you have to make up your mind if
you are going to take the evening primrose every day or not. Should
you ever decide to stop evening primrose and has had an effect of
increasing the effect of warfarin, then you could put yourself at risk for
having a clot. You would have to increase your warfarin dose
accordingly.
If you are taking warfarin and add evening primrose oil to the
things that you take you should have your INR checked after a week or
so to be sure that it is still in the right range. The warfarin dose
may need to be adjusted downward. The key to warfarin therapy is
consistency. If you skip days of the evening primrose
and it does have an effect on warfarin, you will find that your INR (test
of how warfarin is working) will go up and down reflecting whether you are
taking evening primrose or not. So you have to make up your mind if
you are going to take the evening primrose every day or not. Should
you ever decide to stop evening primrose and has had an effect of
increasing the effect of warfarin, then you could put yourself at risk for
having a clot. You would have to increase your warfarin dose
accordingly.
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Last updated November 7, 2004