Pulmonary embolism: an under-recognized yet frequent cause of death in parkinsonism.

There are very few detailed reports on the cause of death in patients with Parkinson syndrome, and most reports lack postmortem verification. Pulmonary embolism has been reported as an infrequent terminal event. We reviewed the results of 60 complete autopsies performed on patients with Parkinson syndrome personally cared for at our institution. Pulmonary embolism was second only to pneumonia as the most common cause of death overall.