Mayo Clinic Health Manager
Get free personalized health guidance for you and your family.
Get Started
close window
Housecall Archives
About our e-newsletters
- Free e-newsletters
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- We do not share your e-mail address
Housecall, our weekly general-interest e-newsletter, keeps you up to date on a wide variety of health topics with timely, reliable, practical information, recipes, blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts and more. Our biweekly topic-specific e-newsletters also include blogs, questions and answers with Mayo Clinic experts, and other useful information that will help you manage your health.
Housecall Archives
close window
Mayo Clinic Housecall
Stay up to date on the latest health information.
What you get
- Free weekly e-newsletter
- Mayo Clinic expertise
- Recipes, tools and other helpful information
- We do not share your e-mail address
Complications
By Mayo Clinic staffThe abnormal blood clotting of factor V Leiden can lead to a variety of serious and potentially serious complications, including:
- Pregnancy complications. Although most women with factor V Leiden have normal pregnancies, the mutation has been linked with an increased risk of miscarriage and possibly other complications during pregnancy, including pregnancy-induced high blood pressure (preeclampsia), slow fetal growth and early separation of the placenta from the uterine wall (placental abruption). If you're a woman with factor V Leiden and you get pregnant, you're doctor should monitor you carefully throughout your pregnancy.
- Deep vein thrombosis (DVT). A complication of a deep vein clot can be damage to the valves in the veins in your affected leg, which normally serve to keep the blood flowing upward to your heart. This may result in a condition called chronic venous insufficiency, which causes chronic swelling and discoloration in your lower legs, because of the impaired blood flow.
- Pulmonary embolism. DVT puts you at risk of a clot breaking off and traveling to your lungs or, rarely, your brain. A pulmonary embolism can be fatal, so it's important to watch for signs and symptoms of a pulmonary embolism and to seek prompt medical attention.
