Prevention of venous thromboembolism after knee arthroplasty

Pulmonary embolism (PE) is a major cause of death in a hospitalized population, In North America, there are about 260,000 cases of clinically recognized venous thromboembolism (VTE) each year with an in-hospital case fatality rate of 12%. Considering the difficulties of making an accurate diagnosis in this commonly silent disease, there may be as many as 600,000 clinically significant cases per year.