Pulmonary embolism in patients with severe COVID-19 treated with intermediate- to full-dose enoxaparin: A retrospective study

Submitted: January 2, 2021
Accepted: March 4, 2021
Published: March 16, 2021
Abstract Views: 2071
PDF: 847
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Coronavirus disease (COVID-19) may predispose patients to pulmonary embolism (PE), despite standard thromboprophylaxis. Our retrospective study aimed to report the prevalence of PE in patients with COVID-19 and severe respiratory failure (SRF) treated with intermediate- to full-dose enoxaparin. We analyzed data from patients with COVID-19 pneumonia and SRF admitted to our Respiratory Intensive Care Unit (RICU) from February 27 to April 20, 2020. All patients received at least intermediate-dose enoxaparin (40 mg twice daily). Computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) was used to detect PE. Ninety-two patients with COVID-19 pneumonia and SRF were admitted to our RICU. Twenty-two patients underwent CTPA (24 %), 11 of whom had PEs (12%). We hypothesize that the enoxaparin treatment may be responsible for the lower prevalence of PE as compared to previous reports of similar patients, even if our report had several limitations, mainly the small sample size.

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Ethics Approval

This study was approved by the Valpadana ATS (Cremona, Italy) Ethics Committee on 7 July 2020 (Study code 95-2020-OSS_FARM-MN30), Institutional approval: This study was approved by the ASST Mantova on 20 August 2020 (deliberation N° 1043)

How to Cite

Scarduelli, Cleante, Francesco Inglese, Massimiliano Beccaria, Fabio Spreafico, Martina Garuti, Antonietta Pecoriello, Giulia Cervi, Graziana Greco, Sara Scarduelli, Giuseppe Lucchini, Giuseppe De Donno, and Claudio Borghi. 2021. “Pulmonary Embolism in Patients With Severe COVID-19 Treated With Intermediate- to Full-Dose Enoxaparin: A Retrospective Study”. Monaldi Archives for Chest Disease 91 (3). https://doi.org/10.4081/monaldi.2021.1758.