Tom Nolan’s research reviews—1 June 2023

Scanning for pulmonary embolismWe all know that feeling when a colleague comes up to you with a grave look on their face and says, “You remember that patient you saw last week with….” On a good day the story might go that you admitted the patient to hospital, it turns out that they had a pulmonary embolism, and now they’re better. And on a bad day? Well, you’d better hope you made some good notes and, better still, followed a validated pulmonary embolism clinical decision rule. These are intended to answer the age-old question: “How do you know it isn’t a pulmonary embolism?” without always having to request a computed tomography pulmonary angiogram (CTPA). But CTPA testing seems to be going up regardless. A retrospective analysis of 26 emergency departments in six European countries found that, between 2015 and 2019, the rate of CTPA testing increased from 836 per 100…
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