News of note: Jalen Hurts’ NFL season-ending blood clot diagnosis

Key Takeaways:

• Blood clots are a normal function of the blood. They become a concern when they occur inside the blood vessels.
• Nobody is immune to blood clots, but they aren’t often seen in young, healthy individuals.
• Prolonged sitting – like that during long car or plane rides – can cause clots to form, so regular movement is important to keep the blood flowing.

On Oct. 19, ESPN reported that Philadelphia Eagles quarterback Jalen Hurts would miss the rest of the NFL season after doctors discovered multiple blood clots in both lungs.

The 28-year-old Hurts is, by all accounts, a healthy professional athlete, so how does this happen, and what does it mean?

In this blog, we’re going to discuss what blood clots are, their symptoms, and how they’re treated.

What is a blood clot?

Clotting is a normal and important function of the blood. When you cut yourself or you get a scrape, the blood needs to clot to stop the bleeding. 

You worry about it when the clotting happens inside the blood vessels. In this case, we worry about it happening inside the veins or especially the deep veins. When that happens, we call that a deep vein thrombosis or a DVT.

How do blood clots form?

There are three major ways we worry about these clots forming. 

The first is when the blood flow is slow for one reason or another. That can happen with prolonged immobility, sitting for long periods of time or if you’re sick or after surgery. All those things can slow the blood flow down and make the blood more prone to clotting.

The second is after an injury or surgery. The inflammation caused by it can slow blood flow down and cause clots. 

The third is often other medical conditions, whether they are inherited conditions or other illnesses, that can cause patients to be more prone to clotting.

Is it common for someone young and healthy, like a professional athlete, to develop blood clots?

Athletes aren’t immune to blood clots by any means. Less often, you’ll see them in young, healthy individuals. Athletes regularly travel to and from games or matches or are recovering from various skeletal injuries.

They can get blood clots just like anybody else. We just don’t see it as often in young, healthy athletes.

How dangerous are blood clots?

The danger of blood clots really depends on the size, severity, and extent of the clots and where they are. 

For small clots, particularly below the knee in those deep veins, they can often be asymptomatic or maybe just cause mild symptoms, swelling, and pain, and when they get larger and in the bigger veins higher up the thigh and closer to the hip or pelvis, they can be associated with a lot more pain and symptoms. 

If they become large enough that they block blood flow, the pain can be very severe to the point where the blood flow into the leg can be threatened, and the limb itself can be threatened. 

The other thing we worry about with blood clots is that they were to break off from those veins and travel their way through the blood system into the lungs, that’s called a pulmonary embolism or a PE. Those can be severe in a lot of cases.

What are symptoms of a blood clot?

If it’s a small clot in a vein below the knee, there can be some calf pain and some leg swelling. It’s more often in just one leg, but it can happen in both. 

If the clot is bigger and works its way further up the leg or the hip, you can have more severe pain, increased swelling, redness, and difficulty walking.

If that were to break loose and go to the up to the lungs and cause a pulmonary embolism, it would cause sudden shortness of breath, chest pain, dizziness, and you can pass out. 

Those are all signs of more severe pulmonary embolism. Even with more mild symptoms, you should still be evaluated right away.

When should you see a doctor?

Preferably the day you start noticing these symptoms. If you can’t be seen by your primary care provider that day, go to urgent care or the ER.

It’s a simple test to find out if there is a blood clot. It’s a quick ultrasound up and down the leg.

With pulmonary symptoms – chest pain, shortness of breath, dizziness, fainting – those are all 911 phone calls to get to the ER as fast as you can.

How are blood clots treated?

The good news for all of this is that the treatment for DVT usually consists of a blood thinner to keep the clot from growing or traveling any further up the leg while giving your body time to break it down on its own. 

The same process applies to pulmonary embolisms. The blood thinner helps the body have blood flow around the clots that have broken loose. 

Where I get involved in interventional radiology is for select patients. We can go in with small wires and tubes and use X-ray guidance to navigate our way into the body, usually through a small puncture hole in the vein. We work our way to the clots and then pull them out. We can also inject medication to help dissolve them, whether it be in the leg or the lungs.

We can treat them in both places on a case-by-case basis, if the clots meet certain criteria.

Can blood clots be prevented?

Not every clot can be prevented, but we can do some things to help minimize them as best we can. 

During long car trips or plane rides, do simple exercises. Move your ankles around, get up and walk down the aisle on the plane, and keep your legs moving because what helps keep that blood flow coming up out of your legs is flexing those muscles and getting the blood moving.