R.E.B.E.L. EM - By Salim Rezaie - July 11, 214
"D-dimer has been shown to increase with age, which can cause a lower specificity (i.e. more false positive tests) in older patients. The result of this would be that older patients would often have more diagnostic imaging or downstream testing, but on the other hand, maybe a higher cut-off d-dimer value may lead to increased false negative cases (i.e. missed venothromboembolism) and make this strategy less safe. Recently, I wrote a post on age-adjusted d-dimer testing on REBEL EM, but since that post there was a new article that was published in Chest 2014. This post, will specifically focus on an update of age-adjusted d-dimer testing based on the above article."
http://rebelem.com/update-age-adjusted-d-dimer/