Study: Blood Clot Care Inadequate

Most dangerous blood clots occur in the 90 days after a hospital stay, say Canadian doctors, but less than half of patients go home with drugs.

Researchers at McMaster University Medical Center reviewed data on patients diagnosed with venous blood clots and discovered that 73.7 percent of the clots had occurred at home, and 59.1 percent occurred in patients who had been hospitalized in the past three months.

But only 59.7 percent of the hospitalized patients had received anti-clotting therapy in the hospital, and less than half were sent home with any kind of clot-preventing device or therapy.

Because most cases of venous thromboembolism occurred within 29 days of hospital discharge, it is not unreasonable to assume that some of these cases may have been prevented simply by increased use of in-hospital prophylaxis, including compression stockings, pneumatic compression devices, and anticoagulants, such as heparin, the authors wrote.

They added that, since the length of hospital stays is decreasing, patients may spend more time immobilized at home and could benefit from anti-clotting therapy after discharge.

The researchers said blood clots in the legs, pelvis and lungs are a major problem in hospitalized patients, and previous studies showed that most of them formed in the three months following hospitalization.

The study was based on medical records of people in Worcester, Mass., who were diagnosed with venous blood clots in 1999, 2001 and 2003.

A report on the research was published in the July 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine.