SALT LAKE CITY (ABC 4 News) - Every year one million Americans develop blood clots in the veins in their legs, and every year, it kills between 200 and 300-thousand of those people. DVT, or deep vein thrombosis can happen to anyone. Now there is a treatment that gives people a better chance of survival with fewer complications.
Amy Steed had just completed a fourteen hour road trip to California when she started experiencing pain in the upper part of her leg. “I could be gone right now if they hadn’t found it, and that scares me.” Amy was diagnosed with DVT. Peter Hathaway, M.D. is a Board Certified Interventional Radiologist. He says DVT’s are common and deadly. “A DVT is a blood clot in a vein in the leg and the most common cause for that is sitting around like sitting in a plane for a long plane ride.”
Dr. Hathaway says when you stop moving, your blood slows down, and clots form more easily. Once the clot forms in the leg, there is nothing to stop it from moving. “A piece of that can break off and cause those complications that everybody is so worried about.” Pulmonary embolism, is the most serious of those complications. It occurs when the clot moves into the lungs. “When a blood clot breaks off and goes to the lungs, that can cause sudden death, it can cause shortness of breath, it can cause the person to cough up blood.”
Amy’s DVT was found while it was still in her leg. She went to a doctor after experiencing the classic DVT symptoms of swelling, pain and redness. She says “it was like a balloon, just huge, fat, and tight. The skin was very tight.” Amy was one of the first in Utah treated with a new procedure that uses a catheter device to break apart the clot. Dr. Hathaway performed the surgery. He describes it as a roto-rooter for the vein. “Where there’s a mechanical action to the catheter, it mixes the clot dissolving medicine into the clot, and it just liquefies it.”
He says the new procedure shortens recovery time over older blood thinning methods and decreases the chance of permanent damage that can lead to a lifetime of leg swelling and pain.
The Trellis Catheter procedure is currently being studied by the National Institute of Health and could eventually become the standard for treatment of large clot DVT. It is already approved and covered by most major insurance companies.
