CORR Insights^®: Incidence and Risk Factors for Pulmonary Embolism After Primary Musculoskeletal Tumor Surgery

Excerpt

The paper from Ogura et al. identified surprisingly low pulmonary embolism (PE) and fatal PE rates, which are on par with the best studies of primary joint replacement. Unfortunately, because of how the data were collected, we have no information about the approaches the authors used for deep vein thrombosis (DVT) prophylaxis. We can infer from the author’s discussion that chemoprophylaxis was likely less aggressive than what would be considered so in U.S. populations. That being the case, the low frequency of PE the authors observed does not support aggressive anticoagulation in the sarcoma resection population. Even considering the subset of bone tumor resection patients, the study found only 0.81% incidence of PE. …