Venous thromboembolism among gynecologic cancer patients in Zaria

Cancer is one of the most important acquired risk factors for Venous Thromboembolism (VTE) including Deep Vein Thrombosis (DVT) and Pulmonary Embolism (PE). Patients with active malignancy have up to six-fold increased risk of symptomatic VTE than the general population. The risk of VTE in patients with gynecologic malignancy is especially high because of the nature of the tumor, its pelvic location, associated comorbidities, and systemic chemotherapy. The objective of this study was to determine other risk factors, incidence, clinical presentation, and immediate outcome of treatment of thromboembolism in patients with gynecologic cancers in Ahmadu Bello University Teaching Hospital (ABUTH), Zaria, Nigeria. It was a retrospective cross-sectional descriptive study of gynecologic cancer cases that were diagnosed with VTE while on admission from 2007-2016 in ABUTH. The overall prevalence of clinical VTE was 2.8% in gynaecologic malignancy. All were DVT. Most cases of DVT were present in ovarian cancers with left-sided preponderance. There is a need for the provision of modern imaging equipment to facilitate timely and highly sensitive diagnosis of VTE in low-resource settings. The main limitation of this study was the inability to find any confirmed case of PE.