Central venous catheters-related-thrombosis and risk factors in oncological patients: A retrospective evaluation of recent risk scores

BACKGROUND: Insertions of central venous catheters (CVC) has become a common practice in Onco-Hematologic Units to administer systemic treatments. Unfortunately they can cause complications influencing patient’s care-pathway significantly. Oncological patients have a higher thrombotic risk than the general population, therefore specific recent risk scores are spreading through the clinical practice, such as Khorana, Protecht, COMPASS-CAT, and Michigan scores. METHODS: A retrospective cohort of 177 out of a total of 3046 outpatients accessing the Medical Day Hospital of Istituto Nazionale Tumori di Milano from March 2019 to February 2021 aged ⩾ 18 years who developed CVC complications was analyzed extracting clinical data from their medical records. Focusing on the risk factors, especially through recent risk scores to estimate the thrombotic risk we used Wilcoxon-test for continuous variables and the Pearson-Chi-Square test for categorical variables. RESULTS: Anticoagulants resulted a protective factor mostly for partial CVC occlusion (p = 0.0001), preventing CVC occlusions. CVC occlusions were significantly associated with epitelial tumor histotype, (p = 0.0061). Complete CVC occlusions were significantly associated with peripherical inserted central venous catheters (PICC) (p < 0.0001). Catheter-related-thrombosis (CRT) was significantly associated with peripherical-inserted-central-venous-catheter, both when it was diagnosed clinically (p = 0.0121) and radiographically (p = 0.0168). There was a strong association between CRT and a high grade of Khorana Score (p = 0.0195), Protecht Score (p = 0.0412), COMPASS-CAT Score (p = 0.0027). A positive statistical trend was observed between the Michigan Score and CRT in patients carrying PICC (p = 0.053). CONCLUSIONS: There are many different and various factors associated with higher or lower risk of CVC thrombotic complications, so it could be useful to test the recent risk scores to estimate thrombotic risk in oncological patients in clinical practice.