Massive pulmonary artery thromboembolism. How "to discern a whole forest behind two pines"?
Pulmonary artery thromboembolism (РТЕ) is an often life-threatening condition; even nowadays, however, РТЕ is detected much less frequently than it is actually present. Results of postmortem examinations show that more than a half of massive pulmonary thromboembolism cases are not diagnosed in lifetime, primarily due to extremely low specificity of clinical symptoms observed in thromboembolism and obtained from instrumental data. Moreover, analysis of literature and our own observation data show that even massive РТЕ is asymptomatic or has minimal symptoms in every sixth patient, and every fifths patient has no changes on ECG and/or echoCG. These facts make very urgent the issue of РТЕ diagnostics, which is favored by the algorithm proposed in the present article.