Deep venous thrombosis after major abdominal surgeries: a tertiary level centre study

Abstract

Background: Deep venous thrombo-embolism is a proven major complication in the postoperative setup among the western population. Hence specific guidelines exist on thrombo-prophylaxis for surgical patients. The limited number of studies available on the Indian patients do not provide conclusive data regarding the incidence of postoperative thrombo-embolism. Also, Indian patients are not routinely given prophylactic anticoagulants in many settings still now. In this research, we studied the incidence of deep venous thrombosis among patients who underwent major abdominal surgeries, over a period of 2 years.Methods: This retrospective descriptive study was done on patients who underwent any sort of major abdominal surgery from the surgical wards of Government Medical College, Thiruvananthapuram, for 2 years. This data was used to analyses the incidence of and factors related to postoperative deep venous thrombo-embolism.Results: We studied a total of 334 patients who fulfilled the inclusion criteria. Among these patients, only 1.19% developed deep venous thrombosis during the post-operative period. Since no guidelines existed regarding the usage of thrombo-prophylaxis during that period, very few patients were found to have used any of the prophylactic measures.Conclusions: The incidence of postoperative deep venous thrombosis is not very high in the Indian population after major abdominal surgeries. This might be due to the relatively low prevalence of hyper-coagulable states in the community itself. As a corollary, routine chemical prophylaxis might be administered only in high risk patients. Other measures like early ambulation and mechanical prophylaxis might be used in patients with lesser risk.