Science Saturday: Collaborative study discovers new disease behind patient’s recurring blood clots
In 2018, a male affected person in his 60s started experiencing chest pains, which turned out to be attributable to a number of blood clots in his lungs. As he visited a number of establishments in and round his house state of Michigan, medical doctors carried out the standard testing panels to search for a situation referred to as thrombophilia that causes blood clots to type too simply. But checks didn’t verify the recognized thrombophilic situations.
“So people were not able to give him an answer as to why he had thrombosis with potentially life-threatening clots,” says Anand Padmanabhan, M.B.B.S., Ph.D., a Mayo Clinic laboratory drugs and pathology specialist.
A collaboration between Mayo Clinic and University of Michigan Health solved the medical thriller. The work led to the event at Mayo Clinic of a new methodology to check for clotting disease and the identification of a beforehand unknown blood clotting situation.
A clotting situation that did not add up
In addition to the unexplained clotting, a number of particulars in regards to the man’s situation baffled the clinicians he had seen. Why, for example, did he have intermittent low platelet counts, often known as thrombocytopenia? He was seen by Jordan Schaefer, M.D., a hematologist at University of Michigan who makes a speciality of thrombotic problems.
Even although he had regular platelet values, the affected person’s historical past was regarding for the medication-related complication often known as heparin-induced thrombocytopenia, or HIT. Testing confirmed this analysis. However, essentially the most mysterious element of his situation was that though the person was now not taking the blood-thinning drug heparin, he continued to check optimistic for HIT in follow-up.
Read the remainder of the article on the Discovery’s Edge weblog.
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