Sunday, April 05, 2009

Grapefruit, birth control pill interaction may have caused weird blood clot case

From the Canadian Press:
Chalk another one up to the bizarre power grapefruit and grapefruit juice have to mess around with medications.

An American woman in her 40s nearly lost a leg to gangrene because of a confluence of health factors exacerbated by a diet that included daily doses of grapefruit, the doctors who treated her reported in a medical journal on Friday.

"The way I think of it actually is like she's a setup for the perfect storm. And I believe it was the grapefruit that tipped the balance," Dr. Lucinda Grande, a medical resident at Providence St. Peter Hospital in Olympia, Wa., explained in an interview.

Grande is the first author on the case report, which appears in this week's issue of The Lancet.

The woman, then 42, arrived at the hospital's emergency room last November with a badly swollen and discoloured left leg. She was experiencing shortness of breath and light-headedness.

Doctors diagnosed a large deep vein thrombosis - a dangerous blood clot - in her left leg, running all the way from her hip to her calf. Because of the condition of the leg, the doctors treating her were worried she might be developing irreversible gangrene that would force amputation of the limb. ...more

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