Grant: Project Grant

Cerebral venous thrombosis describes blood clots that form in veins that drain blood from the brain. It is most common in younger adults and around pregnancy. It can cause headaches, vision loss, weakness, seizures and coma. Fifteen percent of patients are left dead or disabled and 25% cannot return to work. CVT is also a difficult condition to diagnose, and patients may visit a doctor multiple times before the CVT is found. We want to study how frequently CVT occurs in British Columbia and what types of patients (in terms of age, sex, use of hormone containing medications and past medical history) have a higher risk of dying, spending longer in the hospital or having to come back to hospital for complications with this condition. We also want to see how many times a CVT patient will visit a doctor before she/he is diagnosed. We will do this by looking at hospital records and linking them to other data sources from the government. CVT is a rare condition so it is hard to study its treatment with large trials. Most experts agree that strong blood thinners should be used but which one, and how long people should be treated, is unclear. We want to link hospital records to prescription records to see how doctors have been treating CVT in British Columbia since 2000. We will see what factors may determine the type of blood thinner the patient gets and how long they get the treatment for. It is important to see if certain types of doctors (different specialist or doctors in different geographic areas) treat the condition differently. One of the long-term serious complications of CVT is seizures. Using prescription records, we can see how many people with CVT need treatment for seizures, what types of drugs are used and for how long. This will allow us to better understand the total cost and disability of CVT. Through this project, we hope to understand how CVT has been treated by physicians when there is no high-quality Canadian data for this condition.