Inpatient Management of Pulmonary Embolism: Clinical Characteristics and Mortality in a High-Volume Tertiary Care Center

Abstract

The optimal management strategy for submassive or intermediate risk pulmonary embolism (IRPE)-anticoagulation alone versus anticoagulation plus advanced therapies-remains in equipoise leading many institutions to create multidisciplinary PE response teams (PERTs) to guide therapy. Cause-specific mortality of IRPE has not been thoroughly examined, which is a meaningful outcome when examining the effect of specific interventions for PE. In this retrospective study, we reviewed all adult inpatient admissions between 8/1/2018 and 8/1/2019 with an encounter diagnosis of PE to study all cause and PE cause specific mortality as the primary outcomes and bleeding complications from therapies as a secondary outcome. There were 429 total inpatient admissions, of which 59.7% were IRPE. The IRPE 30-day all-cause mortality was 8.7% and PE cause-specific mortality was 0.79%. Treatment consisted of anticoagulation alone in 93.4% of cases. Advanced therapies-systemic thrombolysis, catheter directed thrombolysis, or mechanical thrombectomy, were performed in only six IRPE cases (2.3%). Decompensation of IRPE cases requiring higher level of care and/or rescue advanced therapy occurred in only five cases (2%). In-hospital major bleeding and clinically relevant non-major bleeding were more common in those receiving systemic thrombolysis (61.5%) compared to anticoagulation combined with other advanced therapies (11.7%). Despite the high overall acuity of PE cases at our institution, in-hospital all-cause mortality was low and cause-specific mortality for IRPE was rare. These data suggest the need to target other clinically meaningful outcomes when examining advanced therapies for IRPE.

Keywords: Cause specific mortality; Inpatient mortality; Intermediate risk pulmonary embolism; Submassive pulmonary embolism.