Another Validation of Clinical Assessment and d-Dimer to Rule Out PE

Despite research showing that clinically important pulmonary embolism (PE) can be excluded when patients with low clinical probabilities have negative d-dimer test results, many clinicians continue to order pulmonary computed tomography angiograms (CTAs) in virtually every patient with suspected PE. Researchers conducted this study at a community teaching hospital in Chicago to determine the accuracy of clinical risk assessment plus d-dimer testing in 627 emergency department patients in whom clinicians considered PE as a diagnostic possibility. All patients underwent clinical risk assessment (using the previously published revised Geneva score [see Table]), d-dimer testing (using a quantitative immunoturbidimetric assay by Dade Behring), a…