The Chest Diseases Institute warns of “Pulmonary Embolism,” a sudden silent threat that can be fatal. It advises checking for common warning signs and outlines treatment methods.
Following the tragic news of “Nong Aor,” a staff member at Kamphaeng Phet Rajabhat University, who suddenly died from pulmonary embolism at Kamphaeng Phet Hospital on 17 Aug 2026, relatives, friends, and colleagues mourned deeply. This case is reported to occur in only 1 in 1,000 instances.Read the news: “Nong Aor” dies suddenly; family questions six-hour delay in hospital transfer process, hospital responds.)
The Chest Diseases Institute has provided public education about “pulmonary embolism,” including early warning symptoms and treatment guidelines.
. Pulmonary Embolism (PE) is a dangerous condition caused by a blood clot suddenly blocking a lung artery, disrupting gas exchange, reducing blood flow to the lungs, and rapidly increasing pulmonary artery pressure. This disease has two main stages:
Key risk factors include major surgery or prolonged hospitalization, extended immobility, injury, pregnancy, obesity, cancer, or blood clotting disorders.
Common warning symptoms include sudden shortness of breath, chest pain especially when inhaling, palpitations, coughing up blood, and in severe cases, shock that can be fatal.
Treatment involves thrombolytic therapy to dissolve clots in high-risk patients or those experiencing shock, reducing mortality and acute complications, or catheter-directed therapy to directly remove or dissolve clots.
For patients at high risk or those who cannot use systemic thrombolytics, anticoagulant drugs are the basic treatment to prevent clot growth and recurrence.
Patients often experience easy fatigue, weakness, chronic cough or coughing blood, chest tightness, dizziness, and swelling in the feet or abdomen once heart failure develops.
There are three treatment approaches:
1. Medication including specific pulmonary vasodilators to lower lung artery pressure and long-term anticoagulants.
2. Pulmonary thromboendarterectomy (PTE) surgery to remove clots and fibrous tissue from lung arteries, which can be curative but is only suitable for blockages in main pulmonary arteries.
3. Balloon pulmonary angioplasty (BPA), a catheter-based dilation for patients who cannot undergo PTE or have residual disease after surgery, which lowers pulmonary pressure and breathlessness without open chest surgery, reducing risk and recovery time.
Acute pulmonary embolism poses diagnostic challenges because symptoms are often nonspecific and can mimic heart and lung diseases, especially acute coronary syndrome, which presents with chest pain, difficulty breathing, or ECG abnormalities.
Some patients may lack clear risk factors for deep vein thrombosis, causing physicians to overlook pulmonary embolism in initial diagnoses, leading to delayed diagnosis and increased risk of complications or death.
Therefore, diagnosing acute pulmonary embolism requires systematic clinical assessment combined with probability scoring tools, laboratory tests like D-dimer, echocardiography, and imaging—especially computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) for indicated patients—as well as other specialized tests as appropriate, to ensure rapid, accurate diagnosis and timely treatment.