Introduction: Obesity and venous thromboembolism represent a serious medical problem.
Material and methods: Their mutual relationship was studied on the group of 124 patients with venous thromboembolism (the study group) and was compared to the group of 124 randomly chosen controls among hospitalized patients matched for age, sex and risk factor profile of venous thromboembolism (the control group).
Results: Recorded variables were body weight, presence of arterial hypertension, hypertriglyceridemia and type 2 diabetes or impaired glucose tolerance. We found significantly higher prevalence of obesity--40 vs 23 patients (38.5% vs 23%, p = 0.0283) and significantly higher BMI (29.254 vs 26.923, p = 0.002) in the study group. Increased body weight was found to be the only significant risk factor for venous thromboembolism (odds ratio = 2.507, p = 0.0026) and normal body weight was the only protective factor (odds ratio = 0.3989, p = 0.0026). We equally found the significant increase of the prevalence of venous thromboembolism with increasing body weight (p = 0.020). Even in patients without known risk factors for venous thromboembolism (n = 55) we found significantly higher prevalence of increased body weight (BMI > 25) in the study group (82.4% vs 61.2%, p = 0.0221). No other recorded variable was significantly more frequent in the study group.
Conclusion: Reduction of body weight could therefore represent an important challenge in preventing the venous thromboembolism.