Blood clot risk high in cancer--new blood thinner found

Both bad news and good news came in the same batch of American Medical Association information this morning. Patients with malignancies are at least 7 times more likely in the first months after diagnosis to suffer blood clots in the legs or lungs than those without. If it's a blood-related cancer, the likelihood skyrockets to 28 times, according to this Dutch study. Seems that surgery and chemotherapy used to treat cancer also increase the likelihood of clotting.

Happily, a new anti-clotting drug called ximelagatran was found in another study to be better at reducing clot formation while also being less intrusive to administer (patients simply take a pill instead of having injections). The U.S. hasn't approved use of this new drug yet; effects of the liver have not yet been sufficiently gauged.

One step forward, two steps back. Medicine takes an endless succession of potshots--many with unknown consequences--at cancer. Cancers shoot back when the treatments are too strong...when they destroy pieces and parts of the human system needed for other purposes.

It's a dance without end, and our place in the timeline simply a matter of chance. If you have cancer today, you have multiple treatment options that didn't exist for a grandmother with the same disease. And happily, our great-grandchildren will probably have a nearly unimaginable number of options. Let us look forward to the day this dance can end.