More than one-third of all men and women in the United States will be diagnosed with cancer over the course of their lives. Living with cancer, the treatments and their side effects are significant burdens on their own. What many people with cancer often don’t realize is they are up to five times more likely to develop life-threatening blood clots than people the same age without cancer. These clots can occur deep in the veins in many parts of the body and sometimes travel to the lungs, a condition called venous thromboembolism (VTE). This risk is even more pronounced when patients with cancer undergo chemotherapy.
Blood clots are the second-leading cause of death in patients with cancer. We need a better understanding of how we can treat and prevent them, particularly for a large number of the one million patients who are treating their cancer outside the hospital.
That’s why the Janssen Pharmaceutical Companies of Johnson & Johnson, in conjunction with Bayer HealthCare, are furthering our commitment to addressing the most important unmet medical needs of our time by initiating a new research program: CALLISTO. CALLISTO is aimed at generating new evidence in the prevention and treatment of blood clots in patients with a wide range of cancer types.
We are working toward the goal of enhancing our understanding of how clots could be better treated or even prevented in patients with cancer, and our hope is that those living with cancer can focus on beating it without the burden of life-threatening blood clots.
To learn more about the connection between blood clots and cancer, watch the video above or view the infographic below.
