Evaluation of Coagulation Abnormalities in Lung Cancer Patients

Objective: to determine the coagulation abnormalities in patients with lung cancer. study design: case-control study. place and duration: department of pathology isra university hospital hyderabad, sindh – pakistan, and department of medicine liaquat university of medical & health sciences jam- shoro, sindh – pakistan, from june 2006 to december 2007. patients and methods: seventy subjects were recruited for the study by non-probability convenient sampling technique. forty freshly diagnosed histopathology proven lung cancer patients were taken as cases, whereas 30 healthy subjects comprised the control group. plate- let count (plt) was done on hematology analyzer while prothrombin time (pt), activated partial thromboplastin time (aptt) and plasma d-dimer tests were performed by commercially avail- able kits at department of pathology, isra university hospital hyderabad, sindh – pakistan. t- test was applied to determine the significance of differences between two groups whereas p- value up to .05 was taken as significant. results: the mean±sd plt in cases and controls was 394±170 and 216±73 respectively. the mean±sd values for these respective groups were for pt 14.7±0.5 and 12.6±0.4, for aptt 41.5±6.2 and 25.8±3.7. d-dimer levels were <500 in all 30 controls whereas these were up to 2000 in cases. conclusion: there is a strong relationship between coagulation abnormalities and lung can- cer. d-dimer is very sensitive for evaluation of fibrinolyis related with lung cancer.