Acute pulmonary embolism (PE) can be life-threatening in certain situations. Recent epidemiological data suggest that PE can affect approximately 300,000 patients and may result in 60,000 to 100,000 deaths per year in the United States [1,2]. According to two studies that focused on European populations, the 30-day all-cause mortality for non-high-risk PE could be up to 5.1 % and 7.8 %, respectively [3,4]. Our previous data from the China pUlmonary REgistry Study (CURES) demonstrated that 2.9 % of non-high-risk patients died in the hospital [5].
