Jul 20, 2026 · 49 min · 13 segments
Dr. Andrei Rebarber returns to Healthful Woman to discuss thrombophilia, or blood clotting, in pregnancy. In this episode, he explains research into thrombophilia, the hormonal or genetic causes for…
Andrei RebarberGuestNathan FoxHost
It started with my former associate who I had worked with, a guy by the name of Charlie Lockwood.
And he had been at the forefront of thrombophilias dating back to the early 90s, looking at what we call acquired thrombophilias at the time, something called antiphospholipid antibody syndrome.
And that was sort of the first of these sort of supposed clotting abnormalities that may affect pregnancy outcome.
And he sort of first identified a lot of these associations with several other researchers, hematologists, immunologists that he had worked with.
And then by the late 90s, 1999, there was a landmark paper that was published by this guy from Israel by the name of Kaphermic, who actually published this series on women who had genetic clotting disorders and suggested that they were associated with clotting abnormalities.
And that sort of began a tidal wave of sort of belief systems to data to science and a mix of bag of all of that and we're still trying to figure it all out in many aspects of life not just obstetrics but gynecology contraception uses whether you're gonna it impacts on surgical outcomes orthopedic surgery so many things where these things can play a role that are not just exclusive to obstetrics
So our listeners understand when we're talking about thrombophilia, I mean, the concept is that, you know, we all have blood in our arteries and veins, and it normally is a nice, smooth liquid that flows nicely.
And the thought is that if, let's say, that gets disrupted, like we get a cut, we start to bleed.
And it's a very delicate system with lots and lots of proteins and enzymes and factors that go into that.
Either you call it a disorder or they may have some predisposition to either bleed too much or on one end, like hemophilias, things like that, or on the opposite end where they sort of clot too much.
And the main concern in general with these always was, well, if someone has a problem, they're going to get blood clots in their veins or in their lungs, which could be life-threatening.
And then someone said, like you were talking about, well, maybe these things can affect pregnancy because they clot near the placenta or in the uterus or whatever it is.
And these do exist, but the issue is we've identified so many of them that people are walking around with and they don't have any issues that it's very hard to sort out who's going to have a problem and who isn't.
It started with my former associate who I had worked with, a guy by the name of Charlie Lockwood.
And he had been at the forefront of thrombophilias dating back to the early 90s, looking at what we call acquired thrombophilias at the time, something called antiphospholipid antibody syndrome.
And that was sort of the first of these sort of supposed clotting abnormalities that may affect pregnancy outcome.
And he sort of first identified a lot of these associations with several other researchers, hematologists, immunologists that he had worked with.
And then by the late 90s, 1999, there was a landmark paper that was published by this guy from Israel by the name of Kaphermic, who actually published this series on women who had genetic clotting disorders and suggested that they were associated with clotting abnormalities.
And that sort of began a tidal wave of sort of belief systems to data to science and a mix of bag of all of that and we're still trying to figure it all out in many aspects of life not just obstetrics but gynecology contraception uses whether you're gonna it impacts on surgical outcomes orthopedic surgery so many things where these things can play a role that are not just exclusive to obstetrics
So our listeners understand when we're talking about thrombophilia, I mean, the concept is that, you know, we all have blood in our arteries and veins, and it normally is a nice, smooth liquid that flows nicely.
And the thought is that if, let's say, that gets disrupted, like we get a cut, we start to bleed.
And it's a very delicate system with lots and lots of proteins and enzymes and factors that go into that.
Either you call it a disorder or they may have some predisposition to either bleed too much or on one end, like hemophilias, things like that, or on the opposite end where they sort of clot too much.
And the main concern in general with these always was, well, if someone has a problem, they're going to get blood clots in their veins or in their lungs, which could be life-threatening.
And then someone said, like you were talking about, well, maybe these things can affect pregnancy because they clot near the placenta or in the uterus or whatever it is.
And these do exist, but the issue is we've identified so many of them that people are walking around with and they don't have any issues that it's very hard to sort out who's going to have a problem and who isn't.
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