Abstract

MORALES-BLANHIR, Jaime Eduardo; SALAS-PACHECO, José Luis; ROSAS-ROMERO, María de Jesús  and  VALLE-MURILLO, Miguel Ángel. Diagnosis of pulmonary thromboembolism. Arch. Cardiol. Méx. [online]. 2011, vol.81, n.2, pp. 126-136. ISSN 1405-9940.

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is an important disease entity in clinical medicine. It consists of obstruction of pulmonary arterial blood flow of a clot embolism from distant sites of the vasculature. Its incidence is variable depending on the source analyzed and most existing data is in hospitalized patients. The clinical presentation is a broad spectrum, from asymptomatic to cardiogenic shock with sudden death due to acute right heart failure. Recently it has been used to D-dimer as a useful laboratory test and a large negative predictive value in the diagnosis of PE. The current classification schemes recommended guided in clinical, laboratory and image. Chest angiotomography is currently the most commonly used diagnostic method for confirmation of pulmonary embolism, but the standard remains arteriography.

Keywords : Pulmonary embolism; D-dimer; Computed tomography angiography; Mexico.