RISK ASSESSMENT
IWBCA Women’s Thrombosis Burden + Prevention Index™
Pregnancy and childbirth push a woman’s body to the edge of survival. The same biology that prevents hemorrhage causes one in ten maternal deaths from preventable blood clots, and the risk of fatal thrombosis rises up to sixtyfold in the first six weeks after delivery. Cesarean birth, preeclampsia, infection, or even brief immobility can flip that switch. Yet most women are never told that the postpartum period is the most dangerous time in their lives for stroke, pulmonary embolism, or sudden death.
02
Hormonal Contraception + Replacement Therapies
Across all hormonal drugs—contraceptives, fertility agents, and HRT—the vascular risk is undeniable. Women on combined estrogen-progestin contraceptives face a three to fivefold higher risk of VTE than non-users, climbing to six to eightfold with high-risk formulations. In overweight users, the risk increases twelvefold, and in those with obesity it surges twenty-fourfold. Postmenopausal women on HRT face roughly double the risk of pulmonary embolism.
03
Aquired + Inherited Thrombophilia
In women with inherited or acquired thrombophilias, the danger is catastrophic. When hormones enter the mix through birth control, fertility treatment, or hormone replacement therapy (HRT), clot risk can explode up to fifty times higher than baseline. These women are walking into minefields they don’t know exist; a single pill, patch, or injection can be enough to trigger a pulmonary embolism, stroke, or fatal cardiac event in someone who was otherwise healthy.
04
Surgery + Extended Hospitalization
Surgery and hospitalization remain among the deadliest breeding grounds for thrombosis. Within days of immobility or tissue trauma, clot risk can spike 100-fold, with up to 60% of hospital-acquired deaths now traced to undiagnosed deep vein thrombosis or pulmonary embolism. Even minor procedures can trigger fatal clots when combined with dehydration, anesthesia, or hormonal therapy—turning a routine hospital stay into the most dangerous part of recovery.
05
Malignancies + Autoimmune Conditions
Women with breast, ovarian, uterine, or lung malignancies face extreme clotting risk as tumors trigger coagulation and chemotherapy destroys vascular integrity. The danger multiplies when hormones or steroids are added—clot risk can soar twentyfold, turning recovery into crisis. Autoimmune diseases like lupus, antiphospholipid syndrome, and rheumatoid arthritis amplify the same process, making thrombotic death a leading but overlooked consequence of modern treatment.
ABOUT
History of the IWBCA
The International Women’s Blood Clot Advocates (IWBCA) emerged from a sequence of medical crises that revealed the fragility of life and the structural blind spots of modern medicine.
In 2019, the organization’s co-founder suffered a double saddle pulmonary embolism—a health crisis so massive it resulted in pulseless cardiac arrest and system-wide organ failure. Fewer than five percent of patients survive such a presentation, and against all clinical odds, she lived.
Despite being formally identified as high-risk, subsequent symptoms were minimized and repeatedly dismissed, culminating in yet another severe clotting event requiring emergency surgical intervention. Months of disregarded symptoms progressed to advanced lower-limb ischemia so extensive that she narrowly avoided amputation. Survival in such circumstances is rare, and survival with full limb function is nearly unprecedented.
The couple’s confrontation with these failures exposed an unsettling truth that many of the world’s most preventable causes of sudden death—thromboembolism—remains widely misunderstood, underdiagnosed, and statistically invisible in women’s healthcare. Determined to create change, they co-founded the IWBCA to address what policy and medicine repeatedly overlooked. The communication breakdowns, diagnostic gaps, and systemic biases that allow women’s clot-related symptoms to go unrecognized to the point of crisis.
The founders’ academic grounding in kinesiology, public health, and nutrition provided the framework for that mission. Studying under Helen Brown, the Clinical Associate Professor of Movement Sciences at the University of Idaho, she gained direct, hands-on experience in international public health initiatives focused on prevention and health systems design. Her credentials as a Certified Health Education Specialist (CHES) and advanced certifications in Medical Writing, Health Communication, Human Subjects Research, and Biomedical Ethics positioned her to translate complex vascular science into transparent, actionable information for both patients and providers.
Together, the co-founders built the IWBCA as a research-informed, prevention-first organization dedicated to closing the global awareness gap surrounding deep vein thrombosis (DVT), pulmonary embolism (PE), and clotting disorders that disproportionately affect women. The IWBCA is an organization built on lived evidence and grounded in accountability, serving as a stark reminder that survival should not depend on luck, timing, or self-advocacy alone.
Prevention is only possible when women are equipped with the knowledge required to make evidence-based decisions about their health. Yet, when counted by its underlying mechanism, thrombosis claims an estimated 17 million lives worldwide each year and still receives less than 3% of all federal research funding. It is from this disparity that the IWBCA continues its work, confronting a silent epidemic that rewards intervention after crisis while neglecting prevention before it.
PREVENTION INITIATIVES
IWBCA Upstream Health Initiative™
Real progress in women’s health begins before the crisis. It begins upstream, in the space where prevention should take place, but rarely does. For too long, healthcare has waited downstream, pulling women out of the current only after they have been swept under by disease. The system has perfected the rescue but neglected the prevention. Once a woman is pulled from the current, the treatment begins and rarely ends. Symptoms are managed, not eliminated. Medication becomes permanent, and patients become customers for life.
The IWBCA Upstream Health Initiative™ is committed to reversing that pattern. The initiative shifts the focus to the source of risk, where early testing, accurate assessment, and education can keep women from ever falling into the depths of disease in the first place. This approach redefines prevention as an active standard of care. Our purpose is to stop disease before it begins and to create a healthcare model that values protection over lifelong management.
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