23 February 2010

Lifeblood

Lifeblood is a good name for a charity. Especially a charity which aims to increase awareness of thrombosis.

This is what Lifeblood says:

In the UK, the Government has estimated that more than 25,000 deaths occur each year because of VTE, acknowledging that this accounts for more than the combined deaths attributable to breast cancer, HIV, and road traffic accidents. Source.

It sounds OK. If it is true. But is it true? Where did the House of Commons Health Committee get its figures from? Could it have been from Lifeblood by any chance? Perhaps not. This is what Lifeblood stated in their evidence to the Health Committee:


In the UK VTE causes around 32,000 deaths each year.

So what is the real figure. Is it 32,000 or 25,000? Or could it quite possibly be very substantially less? It would be interesting to know what the Office for National Statistics says. Does anybody out there know?

4 comments:

Anonymous said...

You gave us the answer in a comment to another post. The true figure is 2684 deaths per year.

Dr Grumble said...

But I could have chosen to give you this:

The total annual burden of VTE across the 25 member states of the EU (population of 454 million)was estimated to be 640,000 symptomatic deepvein thromboses(DVT) and 383,000 pulmonary emboli(PE). VTE-related deaths were estimated at 480,000 annually. Of these deaths, 34,450 (7%)patients had been diagnosed with VTE and treated,163,050 (34%) were estimated to be sudden fatal PE, and 281,000 (59%) followed undetected PE. The annual population death rate from VTE was just over 0.1%. In the UK, with 60 million inhabitants,this equates to over 60,000 deaths annually.


http://www.dh.gov.uk/prod_consum_dh/groups/dh_digitalassets/documents/digitalasset/dh_073953.pdf

I wonder if many of these people died with pulmonary embolism rather than of pulmonary embolism which is a crucial difference.

Garth Marenghi said...

those figures are BS

the actual figure is much closer to 2-3 thousand deaths per year in the UK

check the HSC report, De Cossart's
reference to the US' figures, these tally well with the actual numbers which are 2-3000 per year according to the ONS

http://ferretfancier.blogspot.com/2010/02/thromboembolism-propaganda-from-hmg.html

Garth Marenghi said...

http://ferretfancier.blogspot.com/2010/02/25000-thromboembolism-lies.html