• Amos O Adeleye and Gabriel O Ogun.
• Division of Neurological Surgery, Department of Surgery, College of Medicine, University of Ibadan, and University College Hospital, UCH, Ibadan, Nigeria. Electronic address: femdoy@yahoo.com.
• World Neurosurg. 2016 May 1; 89: 259-65.

IntroductionPostoperative venous thromboembolism (VTE) is a major surgical complication, fraught with high case fatality rate, to which neurosurgical patients are particularly prone. There is dearth of data on this problem in the neurosurgical literature from sub-Saharan Africa.Materials And MethodsA 6-year prospective descriptive study of postoperative VTE in a neurosurgeon's clinical practice in Nigeria is hereby presented. The clinical case of a fatal, postmortem-confirmed post craniotomy VTE also is annotated.ResultsThere were 10 cases of clinically diagnosed neurosurgical postoperative VTE, representing 2.4% of the surgical patients population. The cases were diagnosed from clinical impressions supplemented with laboratory investigations like the Doppler ultrasonography with B-mode imaging of the deep veins of the lower extremities, and chest computed tomographic angiography. Six of these 10 cases died, a case fatality rate of 60%. Meningiomas were the intracranial tumours operated on in 60% of the cases.ConclusionsPostoperative venous thromboembolism has a very high case fatality rate among these neurosurgical patients. There is need for continuing surveillance of this problem, as well as a heightened vigilance to prevent and treat it in our neurosurgical patient populations.Copyright © 2016 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.

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