Tang et al. (31) enrolled 813 consecutive patients entering the emergency department, with markedly elevated levels of D-dimer (above 5.0 μg/ml, 10 times of the upper normal limit), and identified that sepsis patients had the highest levels of TM and PAI-1, when compared with other types of emergency patients, such as tumour, venous thromboembolism (VTE), trauma, artery dissection and stroke, which suggested that sepsis patients had significant endothelial injury and fibrinolytic inhibition. Here, SERPINE1 is linked to neoplasm.