Effect of ethnicity and gender on the incidence of venous thromboembolism in a diverse population in California in 1996

There have been very few studies that have describe the epidemiology of first-time venous thromboembolism (VTE) in a large, ethnically diverse population. The California Discharge Data Set was used to identify a cohort of cases with incident VTE in 1996. Cases associated with traditional provoking risk factors were identified and the remaining cases were labeled as idiopathic VTE. Direct standardization using census information was performed to compare incidence rates across races,gender, and gender within race. There were 21,002 cases with incident VTE in 1996, a crude incidence of 90 events per 100,000 adults. Thirty percent of all VTE events were pulmonary embolism. The directly standardized incidence per 100,000 California adults was 93 +/- 1.7 (+/- 95% Cl) in women, 85 1.7 in men, 103 +/- 2.1 in Caucasians, 138 +/- 6.5 in African-Americans, 61 +/- 2.8 in Hispanics and 29 +/- 2.4 in Asian-Pacific Islanders (p<0.001 for all inter-group comparisons). After adjusting for misclassification of race, the incidence of VTE per 100,000 was 104 in Caucasians, 141 in African-Americans, 55 in Hispanics, and 2 1 in Asian/Pacific-Islanders. The incidence of idiopathic VTE was significantly lower among both Hispanics and Asian/Pacific-Islanders (p