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Acute aortic dissection (AAD) is a devastating vascular emergency that must be diagnosed early and differentiated from other causes of chest or back pain. The routine evaluation for excluding AAD often is both time- and resource-consuming. A reliable biomarker would be very useful, especially in cases with low-to-intermediate suspicion for AAD.
Researchers performed a systematic literature review and meta-analysis to determine diagnostic d-dimer cutoff values for AAD and then validated the findings in a cohort of 65 patients with confirmed AAD who presented to a single institution in Austria during a 4-year period. The authors report that all the validation cohort patients had d-dimer levels above 0.2 μg/mL (as measured by latex agglutinatio…