Tackling a major health challenge sports stars face

This year, the sports pages have brought a serious health concern back into the spotlight. NBA stars Victor Wembanyama and Damian Lillard both were sidelined during the regular season by deep vein thrombosis, or DVT, a type of blood clot. They joined a long list of athletes, including tennis legend Serena Williams, hockey great Zdeno Chára and basketball Hall of Famer Chris Bosh. Dr. J. Sawalla Guseh, director of the cardiovascular performance programme at Massachusetts General Hospital in Boston, said that athletes as a group aren't inherently at a higher risk for such clots than the overall population.

- Michael Merschel, Tribune News Service

But clots are common, said Guseh, who also is an assistant professor of medicine at Harvard Medical School and team cardiologist for the NFL’s New England Patriots and Major League Soccer's New England Revolution. And athletes are exposed to things that could increase their odds of developing one. DVT refers to a clot that forms in the deep veins of the legs, arms or pelvis. If that clot travels to the lungs, it’s called a pulmonary embolism, which can cause sudden death. The two conditions are also referred to as venous thromboembolism, or VTE. According to American Heart Association statistics, almost 1.3 million VTE cases were tallied in US inpatient settings in 2021, the most recent year for which data was available.

The risk of someone younger than 40 having a VTE is about I in 10,000, said Dr. Mary Cushman, a hematologist who is medical director of the Thrombosis and Hemostasis Program at the University of Vermont Medical Center in Burlington. Athletes' cases tend to get extra attention, "because when your favorite team has a player who goes out because they have a DVT, everybody hears about it," said Cushman, who also is a professor of medicine and pathology at the University of Vermont.