Could the combination of fibrinogen and D-dimer improve risk assessment for acute type A aortic dissection in the emergency department?

D-dimer has been proven to be an excellent rule-out marker for acute type A aortic dissection (ATAAD) with a sensitivity exceeding 95% while specificity remains low. We hypothesized that the addition of fibrinogen, which is decreased in ATAAD patients due to consumption coagulopathy, would increase predictive ability. This was an exploratory, retrospective, single-region, observational study comparing ATAAD patients with available preoperative D-dimer and fibrinogen values who underwent surgery at our department between 2008 and 2023 (93 patients) to all patients who visited an emergency department (ED) in a region of southern Sweden during 2017 and 2018 and whose D-dimer and fibrinogen values were obtained within 24 h (202 patients). The discriminative capacity of ATAAD was evaluated by comparing the area under the curve (AUC) from receiver operating characteristics (ROC) curves calculated for each biomarker alone and for the D-dimer/fibrinogen ratio. The AUC for the ability of D-dimer and fibrinogen to discriminate ATAAD from other diagnoses was 0.784 (95% CI 0.733-0.836) and 0.756 (95% CI 0.701-0.811), respectively. The AUC for the D-dimer/fibrinogen ratio was 0.812 (95% CI 0.764-0.860). In this exploratory study, we could show that the D-dimer/fibrinogen ratio increased the ability to predict ATAAD compared to the biomarkers alone. The improvement in discriminative ability was small, however, and needs further validation to be clinically useful.