Venous thromboembolism in Portuguese hospitals: Where we stand and how we can improve

The fact that venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a common cardiovascular disease, particularly among hospitalized patients, with high mortality and morbidity, makes it a major public health issue.The good news is that it is the leading preventable cause of in-hospital death.Recent years have seen great improvements in all aspects of VTE: prevention, diagnosis and therapy. 1 Aspects of VTE prevention such as identification of patients at risk and effective implementation of preventive measures probably remain the most challenging issues in this field. For the first time in Portugal a prospective study ---the ARTE study 2 ---has gathered solid and valuable information regarding VTE risk profiles and the use of prophylactic measures in hospitalized patients.A new risk score derived from the well-known scores of Caprini 3 and Khorana et al. 4 was applied to a population of 4090 hospitalized patients in medical, surgical, orthopedic and oncology departments.The proposed score is designed to be applied to all types of hospitalized patients.This is a clear advantage over the standard scores, especially considering the increasing complexity of diseases.However,