The Incidence of Venous Thromboembolism in Patients with Acute Ischemic and Hemorrhagic Stroke: A Nationwide Population-Based Study in Taiwan

Abstract

Objective: To investigate the incidence of venous thromboembolism (VTE) among patients with acute ischemic or hemorrhagic stroke. Methods: Research data were collected from a subset of the National Health Insurance Research Database of Taiwan containing medical records of one million individuals randomly sampled from 25.68 million registered beneficiaries. Hospitalizations for acute ischemic and hemorrhagic stroke between 1999 and 2008, including cases of the complication of VTE, were selected according to the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision, Clinical Modification (ICD-9-CM). Results: A total of 9,320 hospitalizations for acute ischemic stroke and 3,124 for hemorrhagic stroke were identified. The incidence of VTE was 0.14% (13 events) in cases of acute ischemic stroke and 0.32% (10 events) in cases of hemorrhagic stroke. The overall incidence of VTE after acute stroke was 0.18%. Multivariate logistic regression demonstrated that the female gender, a history of prior VTE, and the length of hospital stay were associated with an increased risk of post-stroke VTE. Conclusions: Compared with ischemic stroke, patients with hemorrhagic stroke tended to have a higher incidence of VTE. The risk factors for VTE during the acute stroke period included the female gender, length of hospital stay and a history of VTE. The effectiveness of VTE prophylaxis in Taiwanese patients using different methods warrants further study.