Clinical Characteristics and Etiological Analysis of 133 Patients for Pulmonary Embolism Combined with Hemoptysis.

Background In the patients with pulmonary embolism (PE), PE itself can cause hemoptysis and other reasons can also cause hemoptysis. Therefore, the clinical characteristics and the causes of hemoptysis are lacking. Methods A retrospective analysis was performed that involved screening 583 PE patients and determining that hemoptysis occurred in 141 cases. Of these, 8 cases were omitted due to anticoagulation-related hemoptysis or unavailable data, leaving 133 cases that were enrolled in final analysis (127 acute and 6 chronic case of PE). We classified the acute PE patients who combined with diseases which can cause hemoptysis to non-simple group (n =61) and those without these diseases to simple group (n =66). Results The incidence of hemoptysis in PE patients was 23.75%. In the simple group, the amount of hemoptysis ≤ 5 ml was 80.30% (53/66), and ≤ 20 ml was 90.91% (60/66). In the non-simple group who combined with lung cancer, the amount of hemoptysis ≤ 5 ml was 68.4% (26/38) and ≤ 20 ml was 86.8% (33/38). Further analyses revealed that the amount of hemoptysis in the non-simple group was larger than that in the simple group (median 5 [5-125] vs. 5 [5-5], p Conclusions The hemoptysis caused by acute PE or PE combined with lung cancer was mild and was characterized by blood in sputum. PE combined with TB, bronchiectasis and CTEPH are associated with moderate to massive hemoptysis, with a greater risk of hemoptysis ≥ 100 ml.