fish oil and baby aspirin keeps the blood thin.
Unfortunately that doesn't work for Leiden Factor V (or Factor V Leiden as it's sometimes called). It's not about "platelet stickiness" or blood "thinness" -- it's about the body's severe overreaction in production of clotting factor. My husband was hospitalized with clots throughout his lungs at the age of 30, and we discovered it was due to this gene. The clot developed after a 15-hour drive to the AirVenture air show in OshKosh, WI. We didn't realize it until two weeks later when he woke up coughing up blood.
My husband is homozygous for the gene which makes him 80x more likely to develop a clot while just sitting in a chair than you or I (well, except for maybe BigBobber, who's a member of the club too, lol). The only treatment is anticoagulant medication and watching your Vitamin K (think anything green) content very carefully. Getting his INR number regulated was very difficult for us, but we finally did it and got him back in the air (he's a recreational pilot). I'm writing an article about our experiences for the next APSFA newsletter. Here's the current one for anyone who cares to take a read:
http://www.apsfa.org/docs/APSFAVol9SprSum2008.pdf
(APS is a similar genetic condition to Leiden Factor V.)
Unfortunately, the presence of the gene in him has increased our life insurance costs drastically; his new policy is 3x the cost that it would have been if he had signed it the day before he was hospitalized (we were in the process of upping our coverage when this happened). The "genetic non-discrimination" bill that Bush recently signed is a good thing for us; people with the condition have been turned down for health insurance, and we were worried that would happen to my husband too if we ever had to switch from group insurance to private.
Good grief! I was on 6 gm of fish oil and numerous supplements that thinned blood, yet I had a blood clot in mid-April in spite of the fact that I had just worked in yard for several hrs.
One never knows.
If your PT and PTT are not in the safe zone, you cannot have Aspirin or Coumadin. Your pretty much screwed.