Key points from today’s guests:

Steve, blood clot patient

• In September 2023, Steve woke up with a swollen left leg that was twice the size of his other leg.
• He went to a local emergency department and was immediately placed on a blood thinner. He then saw a hematologist who referred him to Dr. Adam Ali, a vascular interventional radiologist at The University of Kansas Health System.
• A clot had developed in a vein that was getting pinched by an artery sitting on top of it.
• He had torn his quad a few days earlier and that likely contributed to making this issue worse.
• Dr. Alli and his team needed to figure out if was best to remove the clot or safer to reconstruct the vein that was collapsed.
• His vein was reconstructed and he has been back to normal.
• He credits Dr. Alli and his team with taking great care of him and advocates that patients know their own body and know when to get the right help.

Dr. Adam Alli, vascular interventional radiologist, The University of Kansas Health System

• In Steve's case, when clot becomes old, that becomes scar tissue and it's hard like concrete. He had a long segment of “concrete” that was a challenge to get through.
• So we decided to reconstruct the vein with stents. We're excited to be able to offer that with the technology and the devices that we have now.
• When a clot is fresh, or less than two weeks old, it's wet and you can wash it away. You can clear it out of the vein a lot easier.
• Once it gets old and becomes that scar tissue, it's a lot harder to remove there are a few devices out there that we can use to try to remove some of that. But if the vessel has been damaged enough, you really need to reconstruct the vessel if you can.
• The artery pinching the vein is a rare condition so it doesn't happen often. The overall prevalence is somewhere between 15 and 30 percent. But we think it's under diagnosed.
• The main risk with an acute blood clot in your leg is that it can go to your lungs and cause through your heart and cause a pulmonary embolus that could kill you. So in the primary setting, when that clot is fresh, that's the main risk that we're concerned about.
• When the clot becomes old and the legs swells, it's something we call post thrombotic syndrome. It can be really life limiting and can make patients miserable. Eventually you can start getting ulcers in your leg that can get infected.
• Steve was the ideal patient because he listened to us about exercises and actions to take post-surgery to get him back to normal.

Friday, April 12 at 8 a.m. is the next Morning Medical Update. There was no FDA-approved treatment for her breast cancer. But 17 years later, a clinical trial saved her life. Find out how doctors took her from diagnosis to survivorship.

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