SAN ANTONIO – Two San Antonio doctors shared their expertise on the recent injury that put Spurs second-year NBA player Victor Wembanyama out for the rest of the season.
Wembanyama was diagnosed with deep vein thrombosis (DVT) in his right shoulder, the team said on Thursday morning.
KSAT spoke with University Health cardiologist Dr. Anand Prasad and Methodist Hospital Vascular Center Medical Director Dr. Andrew Unzeitig to provide insight into Wembanyama’s injury and what he may face in the future.
“It can be in the legs or in the arm. Most commonly, we see deep venous thrombosis in the leg vessels,” Prasad said. “From there, it can break off or migrate, and the fear always is that it can break off and go to the lungs.”
Prasad said that form of DVT could cause a life-threatening pulmonary embolism.
“The first line therapy is to get on blood thinners to help the body dissolve the blood clot,” Prasad said. “The second thing that can be done, depending on where the DVT is, is to remove it.”
That procedure is called a thrombectomy which involves the removal of the blood clot, according to Prasad.
Because Wembanyama will be out for the rest of the 2024-25 season, Prasad said he may be put on blood thinners.
“The important thing is going to be to try to figure out why this happened,” Prasad said. “There are cases in athletes when they overuse their arms, that they can get injury to the veins and that can increase the risk of DVT.”
Unzeitig described Methodist Hospital’s approach to treating DVT.
“We see it in teenagers, and a lot of athletes,” Unzeitig said. “When we treat those here at Methodist, the first stage will be removing that initial clot. And then, we actually end up removing the first rib to relieve that compression. But then, long term, once they’re recovered, they don’t need blood thinners.”
Prasad said Wembanyama’s full recovery time would ultimately be decided by his doctor.
“If they find that it’s just a mysterious clot, it got treated and it won’t happen again, great. He’s back. No big issue,” Prasad said. “If he has some reason to be forming these clots, then that may complicate matters and may need to be treated further on.”
While most patients diagnosed with DVT are not professional athletes like Wembanyama, Unzeitig described some common symptoms others may experience.
“What it causes most commonly is just leg swelling,” Unzeitig said. “And often, it’s after some kind of minor trauma. People hit their calf or something. The blood likes to clot if it’s traumatized. So, trauma, immobility, and then some patients will have some predisposed genetic factor that will make them form clot(s) more often."
For anyone who may be experiencing similar trauma, Unzeitig suggested seeing a health care provider for further testing.
“The test for this is fairly simple,” Unzeitig said. “It’s an ultrasound, it’s not very invasive and, most of the time, the treatment is just medication.”
