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Reported mortality rates from pulmonary embolism (PE) range from 5% to 30%. Stratifying patients according to risk would allow those at high risk to be treated emergently with fibrinolytic agents and those at low risk to be treated as outpatients. Investigators in Spain used data from a prospectively collected, multicenter PE database to retrospectively correlate all-cause mortality with admission d-dimer concentration.
Overall, 588 patients had a diagnosis of PE that was confirmed by helical computed tomography (70%), high-probability lung scan (27%), or both tests (3%). At 3 months, the overall mortality rate was 10.5%, and the mortality rate ascribed to PE was 3.0%. Mortality rates did not differ among patients treated with unfractionated…