Is it time to raise the bar? age-adjusted D-dimer cutoff levels to exclude pulmonary embolism

摘要

You are reading the 40th installment of Annals of Emergency Medicine Journal Club. This Journal Club refers to the Righini et al article published in JAMA on March 19, 2014.1 This bimonthly feature seeks to improve the critical appraisal skills of emergency physicians and other interested readers through a guided critique of actual Annals of Emergency Medicine articles. Each Journal Club will pose questions that encourage readers—be they clinicians, academics, residents, or medical students—to critically appraise the literature. During a 2- to 3-year cycle, we plan to ask questions that cover the main topics in research methodology and critical appraisal of the literature. To do this, we will select articles that use a variety of study designs and analytic techniques. These may or may not be the most clinically important articles in a specific issue, but they are articles that serve the mission of covering the clinical epidemiology curriculum. Journal Club entries are published in 2 phases.