Assessment of Hypercoagulability in Cancer Patients Using Sonorheometry

DESCRIPTION (provided by applicant): The Problem: Venous thromboembolism (VTE), which encompasses the diseases of deep vein thrombosis (DVT) and pulmonary embolism (PE), is a common and life-threatening problem amongst cancer patients. In population-basedstudies, cancer has been associated with a 4-fold increase risk for VTE; in cancer patients undergoing systemic chemotherapy treatment the risk increases to over 6-fold. Several risk factors have been identified, such as primary site of cancer, metastaticdisease, surgery, age/race and presence of comorbid conditions. However, the individual risk factors lack predictive power to effectively identify high-risk patients and VTE remains the second leading cause of death in cancer patients. Better tools for theidentification of patients at high-risk for VTE will have direct effects on patient mortality, morbidity, quality of life as well as length of hospitalization, cost of treatment and consumption of health care resources. Although several tests, such