Black patients are significantly less likely to undergo inferior vena cava (IVC) filter retrieval after placement compared with white patients, a retrospective study using data from the Vascular Quality Initiative (VQI) found. The data was presented at the 2026 annual meeting of the American Venous Forum (AVF) in Denver, Colorado (Feb. 28-March 4).
The study examined patients who underwent IVC filter placement between 2013 and 2025 and analyzed whether disparities existed in both placement and retrieval across racial and gender groups. “We know there is a lot of racial disparities in other aspects of medicine,” said Matthew Pergamo, MD, first author on the study and an assistant professor of surgery at Stony Brook University Renaissance School of Medicine. “There had been a previous paper that reported disparities in IVC filter placement for bariatrics patients and this hadn’t really been examined in the VQI before.”
The analysis, which included nearly 20,000 patients, found no major differences in the placement of IVC filters. However, findings showed a significant disparity when it came to retrieval. Black patients were 34% less likely to undergo retrieval compared with white patients and men were slightly less likely to have the procedure compared with women.
Overall retrieval rates in the study were also notably low. Only about 26% of patients in the cohort ultimately had the procedure. “We need to do better overall — that’s the take home message,” said Pergamo. “We need to get that number higher for all the patients. In certain populations, we also need to focus more on giving them closer follow-up and ensuring they come in to get those filters retrieved.”
Pergamo said that improving follow-up infrastructure could help close that gap. “Having a dedicated IVC filter clinic would be beneficial,” he said. “We used to have that here at Stony Brook. They saw that retrieval rates approached 80% for patients who had filters placed. In the Medicare population, the retrieval rate is only around 32% or so. That would be a good solution.”
The study also highlights the importance of broader efforts to improve patient engagement and trust in health care, particularly among historically underserved populations. “We need to focus more on building trust and outreach to marginalized communities,” said Pergamo. “But that’s a problem not just with vascular surgery, that’s a distrust that goes very far back and it’s hard to bridge that gap.”
Pergamo said additional research is needed to better understand the drivers of these disparities and whether other factors such as comorbidities within each racial group contribute to differences in retrieval rates. “More analysis needs to be done,” he said. “The rate of complications in our study was very low, which is a good thing. But it’s hard to tell if complications happened in certain populations because the number was so low. We need to gather more information on those patients and stratify the data by socioeconomic status to see how that is factoring into things.”
