Peripheral Arterial Embolism After Myocardial Infarction

Primarily because of the established psychological and physiological abnormalities that follow prolonged bed rest, early ambulation after acute myocardial infarction has been recommended by several authors. 1 It has been the clinical impression of one of us (G. de T.) that peripheral arterial emboli occur more frequently in the presence of early ambulation, especially when the coronary occlusion is unsuspected. This paper reports a small group of cases in which massive arterial emboli occurred while the patients were ambulatory. That thromboembolic phenomena occur commonly after acute myocardial infarction has been well established. Hellerstein and Martin 2 found this complication to be the major cause of death in 14% and a contributing cause of death in another 15% of 160 post-mortem examinations after myocardial infarction. In a review of the literature up to 1947, they found the lung to be the organ most frequently involved (23.5%) and the extremities the least