Before treatment, women in a 109-person U.S. study of lung-clot removal showed more signs of heart strain and higher scores for the risk of shock than men—but their short-term results after treatment were broadly similar.
The research looked at people with intermediate-risk pulmonary embolism, or PE, a condition in which a blood clot blocks an artery in the lungs. The study matters because it offers a closer look at how women and men fare after a procedure designed to remove those clots, while also showing how much remains unknown. The findings were presented at TCT 2026 and published in JSCAI.
The team analyzed data from the SYMPHONY-PE IDE trial, which tested the Symphony Thrombectomy System at 17 U.S. centers. Aspiration thrombectomy uses a thin tube, called a catheter, to reach and remove clots from lung arteries. The analysis included 43 women and 66 men. It was a secondary analysis, meaning researchers examined sex-related results from a trial that had been set up to evaluate the device.
Although women more often had elevated blood markers linked to heart strain and higher scores estimating the risk of shock before the procedure, the amount of clot reduction was similar in both groups. After treatment, the median hospital stay was three days for women and men. About 98% of each group went home after their hospital stay.
Researchers reported no deaths and no serious events related to the device during the 30-day follow-up. Major bleeding was recorded in two women and no men among those with follow-up data available. Those numbers are small, so they cannot show whether the difference in bleeding risk is meaningful.
Arman Qamar, a study author and director of the Center for Cardiovascular Personalized Medicine at Endeavor Health Cardiovascular Institute in Glenview, Illinois, said the results pointed to a need for more research. Women in the study entered treatment with signs of higher risk, he noted, while most short-term outcomes after clot removal were similar to men's. Understanding how PE affects women and men could help inform treatment, he said.
The findings are encouraging as an early comparison, but they do not prove that outcomes are equal. With only 109 participants and 30 days of follow-up, the study was too small and brief to draw firm conclusions about differences between women and men. It also did not compare thrombectomy with blood-thinning medication alone, and results from the Symphony system may not apply to other clot-removal devices.
The next step is broader research that follows more patients for longer and compares treatment options directly. For now, this study offers a useful early picture: women showed more warning signs before the procedure, yet women and men had similar clot reduction and hospital stays after it.