Male patient, 30 years old, known medical history of intravenous drugs consumption, hepatitis C and an extensive DVP [about one month ago].
The patient presented to the Hospital emergency department denying any regular medications or drug alergies, complaining about a symptomatic history of night fever, sudoresis, productive cough, shortness of breath and pleurytic chest pain with 30 days of evolution.
To know, DVT has been linked to some neoplastic and less commonly infectious diseases due to a link yet to be fully understood.
After his admission, the patient was submetid to a large pannel of complementary exams that could allow help to reveal clinitians the source of his symptoms, since the blood tests, as well as the performed angioCT of the chest, pointed to the suspect of a clinical condition even rarely associated with DVP - Tuberculosis.
At least one study [a systematic review and meta-analysis], including more than 16000 patients with active Tuberculosis, allowed the scientific community to establish this condition as an independent risk factor for DVP, being the risk, measured by the prevalence of cases and inherent odds-ratio, higher for VTE, DVP and PE, when compared to those patients with inactive Tuberculosis. Nonetheless, and even if TB is so far the main diagnostic hipothesis, one of the main goals of this article is to remind us that sometimes we must look at the patient trough the time and all his clinical events, in order to better understand an underlying condition by adding one plus one.
By this time, the patient is hospitalized in an isolation unit while waiting for the infectious agent yet to be identified.