9. The accompanying symptoms
Ninth, a group of non-specific manifestations including fever, syncope, abdominal pain, productive cough, wheezes, arrhythmia, atrial fibrillation or flutter and delirium may be the precipitating presentation or the accompanying symptoms that make the patient look for medical consultation in the emergency room or clinic. Also, the manifestations of the underlying cause may be the primary complain like lower limb swelling, pain, or hotness in the case of deep vein thrombosis.
The wide range of symptoms and their variability and non-specific nature plus the different stages of the severity of the disease from mild and chronic forms to acute life-threatening conditions make the diagnosis of Pulmonary embolism challenging and some times difficult, requiring the opinion of an expert Pulmonologist or Cardiologist or a complete medical team to confirm the diagnosis.
Many clinical score systems are established to assess the patient in order to improve the susceptibility of the diagnosis, as in the Well’s score. Clinical data collected from the patient is not enough to confirm the diagnosis as Pulmonary thromboembolism is a radiological finding and hence the use of Multi-slice CT pulmonary angiography will be needed in most of the cases to confirm or exclude the diagnosis and may help to guide the medical team to rule out any other diagnosis.
