Association Between Red Blood Cell Indices and Preoperative Deep Vein Thrombosis in Patients Undergoing Total Joint Arthroplasty: A Retrospective Study.

Purpose: To investigate the association of red blood cell (RBC), hemoglobin (Hb), red cell distribution width-coefficient of variation (RDW-CV), and red cell distribution width-standard deviation (RDW-SD) with preoperative deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in patients undergoing total joint arthroplasty (TJA).

Methods: A total of 2059 TJA patients were enrolled. We used the ratios of RBC, Hb, RDW-CV, and RDW-SD to DVT before TJA to create the receiver operator characteristic (ROC) curve, thereby calculating the cut-off values and the area under the curve (AUC). The patients were categorized into groups based on cut-off value, and risk factors for DVT before TJA were subsequently analyzed. We included the variates that were statistically significant in the univariate analysis in the multivariate binary logistic regression analysis.

Results: Preoperative DVT occurred in 107 cases (5.20%). Based on the ROC curve, we found that the AUC for RBC, Hb, RDW-CV, and RDW-SD were 0.658, 0.646, 0.568, and 0.586, respectively. Multivariate binary regression analysis revealed that the risk of preoperative DVT in TJA patients with RBC≤3.92*10 /L, Hb≤118g/L, RDW-CV≥13.2%, and RDW-SD≥44.6fL increased 3.02 ( < 0.001, 95% confidence interval (CI) [2.0-4.54]), 2.15 ( < 0.001, 95% CI [1.42-3.24]), 1.54 ( = 0.038, 95% CI [1.03-2.3]), and 1.98 times ( = 0.001, 95% CI [1.32-2.98]), respectively. The risk of preoperative DVT in patients with corticosteroid use increased approximately 2.6 times ( = 0.002, 95% CI [1.22-5.81]).

Conclusion: We found that decreased RBC and Hb, increased RDW-CV and RDW-SD, and corticosteroid use were independent risk factors for preoperative DVT in patients undergoing TJA.