I'm Anton Helman, and I'm Teresa Chan.

And this is the Journal Jam podcast, where we blend interviews with leading researchers of important emergency medicine journal articles.

With the Annals of Emergency Medicine and academic life in emergency medicine, joint global

emergency medicine journal talk.

And the best of crowdsourced social media-based opinions of emergency medicine providers

from around the world.

In this first ever episode of the Journal Jam podcast, Teresa and I are super stoked to talk about the potential for age-adjusted D-Dimer to rule out pulmonary embolism in low-risk patients over the age of 50.

Now, we all know from experience that PE can be excruciatingly difficult to diagnose clinically because the symptoms and signs are often non-specific and overlap with a whole

slew of other diagnoses like pneumonia, for example. For years, we've been using the well

score to help us categorize patients as low, medium, or high risk, and then use it to help us

decide which patients we might be able to rule out PE with a negative D-Dimer.

So the problem till now has been that the older the patient, the more likely the D-Dimer is to be

positive whether they have a P-E or not. So many of us have thrown the D-Dimer out the window

in older patients and go straight to CTPA, which if you're a risk-averse doc might lead to

over-utilization of resources, huge costs, increased length of stay, increased radiation effects,

etc. And if you're not so risk-averse, then you might miss P.E.s in older patients,

and we don't want that to happen either. So the format of this podcast

is that Teresa and I will give you a bit of background on the adjust PE trial. We'll describe the

paper itself, and then we'll jump into the interview that Sam Sheikh, Anand Swami Nathan,

and Salim Raseh from Academic Life and Emergency Medicine, due with Jeff Klein, who's the vice chair

for research at the Indiana University of School of Medicine and probably the world's most

important researcher in thrombolic disease from an emergency medicine perspective, as well as

...