The standard treatment for these clots — known as deep vein thrombosis (DVT) — is blood-thinning medications and compression stockings. The other, more expensive treatment delivers medication directly to the clot to dissolve it. This procedure, called catheter-directed thrombolysis, has increased in use in recent years despite inconclusive research as to its safety, the study authors said.
“DVT is a very common disease that occurs in about one in 1,000 people per year,” said lead researcher Dr. Riyaz Bashir, an associate professor of medicine at Temple University School of Medicine in Philadelphia.
“This condition is responsible for more than 600,000 hospitalizations each year in the United States, and approximately 6 percent of these patients will die within one month of the diagnosis,” he said.
About 20 percent to 50 percent of people with deep vein thrombosis develop a serious complication called post-thrombotic syndrome, despite conventional treatment with blood-thinning medications and compression stockings, Bashir said. The patients experience chronic leg pains, swelling, skin discoloration and ulcers.
“Many of these people lose their jobs because of the disability it causes,” Bashir added.
Dr. Gregg Fonarow, a professor of cardiology at the University of California, Los Angeles, said several small studies have suggested that use of catheter-directed thrombolysis may lead to a decrease in risk for post-thrombotic syndrome.
“However, none of these studies have been definitive,” Fonarow said. “Guideline recommendations regarding catheter-delivered thrombolysis are mixed, and use in clinical practice is modest and varies substantially by hospital,” he added.
For the new study, published online July 21 in JAMA Internal Medicine, Bashir’s team collected data on more than 90,600 patients hospitalized for deep vein thrombosis from 2005 through 2010.
About 4 percent of these patients underwent catheter-directed thrombolysis and also received blood-thinning drugs, the researchers found.