Diagnostic utility of an age-specific cut-off for d-dimer for pulmonary embolism assessment when used with various pulmonary embolism risk scores

This retrospective cohort study compared the diagnostic utility (sensitivity, specificity and negative predictive value (NPV)) of the age-times-10 adjusted d-dimer cut-off used in combination with the original and simplified Well's pulmonary embolism (PE) scores and the original and simplified revised Geneva scores to identify patients in whom PE is classified as unlikely according to each score. The PE risk scores performed similarly with high sensitivity (97.6, 97.1, 96.9 and 97.1% respectively) and NPV (99.3, 99.3, 99.2 and 99.2% respectively). Each missed only one PE. The age-times-10 age-adjusted d-dimer assay cut-off performed similarly with each of the clinical risk scores tested with high sensitivity and NPV.