Who is at increased risk for a PE?

Yeah.

Well, this is a great question, Darryl, and, and one that, uh, we s- uh, struggle with, uh, all the time.

When I'm seeing patients in the vascular center, or s- more specifically in the thrombophilia center, oftentimes their diagnosis has already been made.

But when I see a patient, either because I'm called to the emergency room or when I'm seeing them in the vascular center sort of as a follow-up to their hospitalization, one of the first things that I try to tease out from the history and interacting with the patient is whether or not this event was provoked or unprovoked.

And perhaps 30 to 50% of patients during a very careful chart review, a very careful history and physical examination, I'm not able to find any specific provoking factor, and we call those patients unprovoked.

So again, the first, the first question that I ask is why did this thing happen, and t- trying to put, uh, patients into one of those two buckets, because it has very important management implications going downstream.

What are some initial diagnostic tests we should order?