A 30 year old man has been admitted to hospital with severe multiple injuries following a motor vehicle accident.
On day 2, his intracranial pressure has stabilised and his head CT shows scattered punctate haemorrhages with subarachnoid blood, with no mass lesion requiring evacuation. His pelvic fracture and right tibia / fibula fracture have been managed with external fixation and a left leg femoral fracture has undergone open reduction and internal fixation.
He has been in good health, but had a DVT 3 years ago and is not on any regular medication.
Outline your approach to prophylaxis for venous thrombo-embolism in this patient.
Risk of VTE is high based on:
• Major trauma with pelvic and lower limb injury and operative intervention
• Possibility of a pro-thrombotic disorder
Therapy also has potential risks:
• Risk of intracranial haematoma expansion with unfractionated or LMW heparin
Management options:
• Quantify potential pro-thrombotic disorder: ancillary history, previous investigations etc
• Unilateral mechanical prophylaxis
• Discuss timing of pharmacological prophylaxis
• Clinical and imaging surveillance
• IVC filter
One can approach this question systematically:
The risk factors for PE are discussed in a separate chapter, but it is a general outline - not specific to ICU patients. The table of undifferentiated risk factors is reproduced below:
Inherited risk factors
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Acute risk factors
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Chronic risk factors
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Thus, according to these generic risk factors, the patient in the question has several reasons to develop a venous thromboembolism: surgery, trauma, immobility, and a CVC. On top of that, he (a 30 year old man) has already had a DVT at the age of 27, which rings alarm bells. Does he have a weird prothrombotic diathesis? Who knows.
In view of this, he sounds like a candidate for some sort of prophylactic therapy.
If one were to answer this question like an adult, one would produce an answer which resembles the following:
Method of anticoagulation
Rationale for chemical anticoagulation
Advantages
Disadvantages
Alternatives to chemical anticoagulation
And what if this patient is coagulopathic from his massive transfusion? Should you anticoagulate him, or is he already "auto-anticoagulated"? Well, it turns out, it doesn't matter what you do, these people clot anway. For some reason, coagulopathic surgical patients seem resistant to the effects of thromboprophylaxis.
Realistically speaking, what is this guy's risk of having a major extension of his traumatic subarachnoid bleed? Generally one must say that we really don't know. It is known, however, that haemorrhagic stroke patients who have an unchanged second CT brain don't tend to suffer from any extension of their bleeding. Small scale studies of traumatic brain injuries complicated by haemorrhage also failed to detect any significant increase in the rate of bleed extension due to routine DVT prophylaxis.
Anderson, Frederick A., and Frederick A. Spencer. "Risk factors for venous thromboembolism." Circulation 107.23 suppl 1 (2003): I-9.
Tapson, Victor F., et al. "Venous Thromboembolism Prophylaxis in Acutely Ill Hospitalized Medical PatientsFindings From the International Medical Prevention Registry on Venous Thromboembolism." CHEST Journal 132.3 (2007): 936-945.
Edwards, Meghan, et al. "Venous thromboembolism in coagulopathic surgical intensive care unit patients: is there a benefit from chemical prophylaxis?."Journal of Trauma and Acute Care Surgery 70.6 (2011): 1398-1400.
Lilly, Craig M., et al. "Thrombosis Prophylaxis and Mortality Risk among Critically Ill Adults." CHEST Journal (2014).
Alhazzani, Waleed, et al. "Heparin Thromboprophylaxis in Medical-Surgical Critically Ill Patients: A Systematic Review and Meta-Analysis of Randomized Trials*." Critical care medicine 41.9 (2013): 2088-2098.
Levy, A. S., et al. "Association Between Pharmacologic Thromboprophylaxis and Hemorrhage Progression in Patients With Hemorrhagic Stroke." Stroke45.Suppl 1 (2014): A209-A209.
Farooqui, Ali, et al. "Safety and efficacy of early thromboembolism chemoprophylaxis after intracranial hemorrhage from traumatic brain injury: Clinical article." Journal of neurosurgery 119.6 (2013): 1576-1582.