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Sandor A. Friedman, MD; Herbert M. Schub, MD; Edward H. Smith, MD; Nathan A. Solomon, MD
Brooklyn, NY

Arch Intern Med. 1970;126(1):167.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text PDF and any section headings.

To the Editor.

—In their Original Article "Restoration of Pulmonary Blood Flow After Pulmonary Embolism," in the February issue (ARCH INTERN MED125:241-247,1970) Winebright and associates have corroborated their clinical impressions of acute pulmonary embolism with lung scans rather than pulmonary arteriography. Unfortunately, pulmonary photoscanning with iodinated I 131 serum albumin, aggregated is quite nonspecific; in one study, 40% of the patients with obstructive lung disease and abnormal scans had normal chest roentgenograms.¹

The authors' statement "... that elderly patients without clinical evidence of chronic lung disease usually have normal perfusion patterns on lung scanning." is open to serious question. We recently studied serial lung scans in a group of elderly patients with no clinical evidence of pulmonary embolism and found widespread, persistent perfusion abnormalities in 57 of 80, 30 of whom had normal chest roentgenograms and laminagrams.²

Although the reason for these defects is not clear, it . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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