| Summary: | No abstract available. Article truncated at 150 words. Another rapid-fire Journal club this month: We covered 6 articles very concisely.Stein PD, Matta F. Thrombolytic therapy in unstable patients with acute pulmonary embolism: saves lives but underused. Am J Med. 2012;125:465-70. (presented in conference by Henry Leudy).It's interesting to note that there is no definitive clinical trial that proves the benefit of thrombolytic therapy for life-threatening pulmonary embolism. On first blush, this study looked promising - with a sample size of >72,000 patients, and a huge protective effect for thrombolytic therapy, reducing mortality from 47 to 15% (p<0.0001).Unfortunately, this study is based on very low quality data. The clinical diagnoses of pulmonary embolism and hemodynamic instability and the administration of thrombolytic therapy were all based on ICD-9-CM billing codes - notoriously inaccurate for use in clinical research. The study design was a retrospective cohort - but there was a high risk of selection bias - patients …
|
|---|
