Young, excellent physical condition,
non-smoker, no genetic predisposition - in other words absolutely
no risk factors for thrombosis. But Eamonn Toland got it all
the same. The 30-year-old British company consultant flew from
London to Hong Kong to hold a weekend workshop for customers.
He made the return journey as soon as the workshop had finished.
That meant a good 29 hours in a plane in the space of three
days. On the flight back, Toland caught up on some much-needed
sleep. Although he had been comfortable in his business-class
seat, he had a mildly painful sensation in his right leg when
he woke up. This is actually a fairly  common
phenomenon in people who spend hours in an aeroplaneseat with
their knees bent, and the pain is normally due to cramp in the
calf muscles. In Toland's case, however, a blood clot had formed
in the leg and had gone on to cause pulmonary embolism. He fainted
as he left the plane. When he came round, he was unable to speak
and had lost all feeling in his right arm. A doctor employed
at Heathrow Airport in London arrived immediately, and many
years of experience with symptoms of this kind enabled him to
identify the problem at once. Toland was taken to hospital straight
away and an antithrombotic drug was administered.
In many cases, however, symptoms don't develop until several
days after a long-haul flight. And then the doctor is groping
in the dark, because the symptoms that the patient is describing
could mean one of several things. The patient generally fails
to connect the problem with the flight and doesn't even mention
to the doctor that he or she has made a long plane journey.
Don't think that Toland was an isolated case, either. There
are no statistics about the incidence of deep vein thrombosis
(DVT) after long journeys, but the Aviation Health Institute
in England estimates that around 30,000 passengers every year
develop a thrombosis of this type, and in several dozen of them
the outcome is fatal. The Sirius study published in 2001 in
France also shows that long-haul flights -
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those lasting longer than four hours - are indeed associated
with an increased risk of thrombosis. A working group led by
Dr. Meyer Michel Samama, a haematologist in Paris, set out to
establish the significance of the individual risk factors for
deep vein thrombosis of the lower leg. The Sirius study concluded
that anyone undertaking a long-haul flight appears to have a
2.35-fold greater risk of thrombosis.
The data published by the German League for Vein Disorders are
bad enough: the League reckons that one in eight people have
a chronic vein disorder. You could be one of them! This, of
course, is a major risk factor for DVT. But there are a number
of other risk factors to consider. Refer to the risk check-list
here to see just
what they are.
This is something you need to take seriously. Every year, there
are around 100,000 cases of pulmonary embolism in Germany alone
as a result of a leg thrombosis - not only caused by long-haul
flights, of course. About 30,000 of these people die because
of the embolism - three times as many as die following road
traffic accidents.
And don't forget that you can also develop a DVT if you spend
long periods sitting in a train or bus!
And now for the good news: there are a lot of things you can
do to prevent DVT. Read here
to find out what you can do and the best way to do it.
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