SAN DIEGO – Among children with types 1 and 2 von Willebrand disease (VWD), a higher proportion of boys than girls reported ever having a bleeding episode and using more treatment products. But the trend did not continue among children with type 3 disease.
Those are some of the key findings from a never-before-published analysis of surveillance data from the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention presented by Karon Abe, PhD, during a poster session at the biennial summit of the Thrombosis & Hemostasis Societies of North America.
Doug Brunk/MDedge News
Dr. Karon Abe
The researchers retrieved data from the UDC (Universal Data Collection System), a federally funded surveillance system of people with hemophilia and other bleeding disorders treated at 130 U.S. Hemophilia Treatment Centers (HTCs) during 1998-2011. Although UDC data collection ended in 2011, a current CDC bleeding surveillance project called Community Counts continues and expands on the work of the UDC.
Between 1998 and 2011, data were collected on 2,413 children with VWD aged 2-12 years. Of these, 2,070 had type 1, 224 had type 2, and 119 had type 3 VWD. The researchers used chi-square analysis and Wilcoxon rank sum tests to assess differences in bleeding characteristics by sex and by type of VWD. Next, they used a multivariate regression model to examine the association between demographic and clinical characteristics and a history of ever having had a bleeding episode among type 1 VWD patients.
Nearly two-thirds of children (65%) were non-Hispanic, 17% were Hispanic, 8% were black, and the remainder were from other ethnicities. In addition, 40% of the children had no family history of a bleeding disorder.
The median age of first bleed was lower among children with type 3 VWD, compared with other VWD types, and was lower among boys than girls with type 1 VWD (36 months vs. 48 months, respectively; P less than .001) and type 3 VWD (9 months vs. 12 months; P = .04), Dr. Abe reported.