A study published by Vanderbilt University Medical Center in “Anaesthesia and Analgesia” showed that postoperative bleeding is more likely to lead to death than thrombus caused by surgery.

Researchers used data from the National Surgical Quality Improvement Project database of the American College of Surgeons for nearly 15 years, as well as some advanced computer technology, to directly compare the mortality of American patients with postoperative bleeding and thrombosis caused by surgery.

The results of the study show that bleeding has a very high attributable mortality rate, which means death, even if the baseline risk of death after the patient’s operation, the surgery they are undergoing, and other complications that may occur after the operation are adjusted. The same conclusion is that the attributable mortality of bleeding is higher than that of thrombosis.

The American Academy of Surgeons tracked bleeding in their database for 72 hours after surgery, and blood clots were tracked within 30 days after surgery. Most bleeding associated with the operation itself is usually early, in the first three days, and blood clots, even if they are related to the operation itself, can take several weeks or up to a month to occur.

In recent years, the research on thrombosis has been very in-depth, and many large national organizations have put forward suggestions on how to best treat and prevent postoperative thrombosis. People have done a very good job of handling thrombus after surgery to ensure that even if the thrombus does occur, it will not cause the patient to die.

But bleeding is still a very worrying complication after surgery. In each year of the study, the mortality rate caused by bleeding before and after surgery was significantly higher than that of thrombus. This raises an important question as to why bleeding leads to more deaths and how to best treat patients to prevent bleeding-related deaths.

Clinically, researchers often believe that bleeding and thrombosis are competing benefits. Therefore, many measures to reduce bleeding will increase the risk of thrombosis. At the same time, many treatments for thrombosis will increase the risk of bleeding.

Treatment depends on the source of bleeding, but can include reviewing and re-exploring or modifying the original surgery, providing blood products to help prevent bleeding, and medications to prevent bleeding after surgery. The most important thing is to have a team of experts who know when these postoperative complications, especially bleeding, need to be treated very aggressively.