| " BLOOD clots can be painful, difficult to diagnose, even life-threatening. But hospital patients -- who are at an especially high risk of developing the condition -- often don't receive treatment to prevent them, researchers have found." " A hospital stay, even one as short as a few days, can greatly increase the chance of developing a clot in the legs or lungs. In fact, blood clots in the lungs, known as pulmonary embolisms, are blamed for as much as 10% of deaths in hospitalized patients. Blood clots are even more likely to develop after a patient has left the hospital." " A study in the July 23 issue of the Archives of Internal Medicine has found that less than half of patients get drug therapy to prevent the clots." " In looking at medical records of 1,897 people diagnosed with the blood clots in the Worcester, Mass., area, researchers found that 60% of the cases occurring in an outpatient setting had happened within three months of surgery or hospital stay." " Of those, only 59.7% had received any type of therapy to prevent the condition while in the hospital, with almost 43% receiving anti-clotting medication and almost 17% receiving non-drug methods." " More than half of the patients who experienced blood clots following hospitalization had been in the hospital for just four days or less, suggesting that the risk doesn't exist only for long-term patients." " The study, led by Dr. Frederick Spencer, director of clinical thromboembolism at the Chedoke Hospital at McMaster University in Ontario, Canada, says doctors should be doing more to prevent these problems, which may occur with greater frequency as the average length of hospital stays shrinks." " "The thing about blood clots is a lot of people don't even know they have them," he says. "Does it mean we need to send everybody home with anticoagulation medication? Maybe, but if we did a better job while they were in the hospital that could also prevent a lot of these cases."" " Traditional therapy to reduce the risk of blood clots includes blood-thinning drugs, such as heparin or fondaparinux, or compression stockings or shoes that help improve blood flow. Clots probably cause more deaths than are recognized because they often go undiagnosed. Symptoms of blockage in the legs -- warmth, swelling and sharp pain -- can be confused with a muscle strain or tear. Untreated, the clots can lodge in the vessels of the lung, cutting off air flow and leading to suffocation." " Dr. Peter Lawrence, chief of vascular surgery and director of the Gonda Vascular Center at UCLA, says
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