Elizalde GJJ

Language: English
References: 0
Page: 262-264
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There is no doubt about the relevance and importance of Venous thromboembolic disease (VTE) in current medicine, both because of its frequency (more than 750,000 new cases per year in the European Community), and because of its high recurrence when anticoagulation is stopped (11% per year, 20% at two years, 29% at five years and 40% at ten years), as well as its high mortality (greater than the sum of the mortality from motor vehicle accidents plus the mortality of breast cancer, plus HIV-AIDS mortality, plus prostate cancer mortality, yes all together!), as well as its long-term sequelae in the form of venous insufficiency and post-thrombotic syndrome and chronic thromboembolic pulmonary hypertension, as well as its escalating costs of care (of up to US $2 million in annual hospital expenses per institution). It has been the third most common cardiovascular disease for years after acute coronary syndromes and cerebrovascular disease, enough arguments to be of interest to any doctor, particularly the specialist in critical care medicine, every time the elderly are 48% of the critically ill population in ICUs and will continue to represent a substantial proportion of patients in the ICU as the general population ages and the evidence increases in the sense that age is not an independent predictor of outcome in ICU, in fact in the series of multivariate logistic regression equations of the APACHE III prognostic system for ICU patients, after adjusting for different variables, age only explains 3% of the variance of the interpatient differences in the risk of death, being the major explanatory variable the acute physiology score.