Internal and emergency medicine
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Historical Article
Vitamin K antagonist therapy: changes in the treated populations and in management results in Italian anticoagulation clinics compared with those recorded 20 years ago.
Vitamin K antagonists (VKA) are the most widely used anticoagulants in the world. An appropriate management of treated patients is crucial for their efficacy and safety. The prospective, observational, multicenter, inception-cohort FCSA-START Register, a branch of START Register (NCT02219984) included VKA-treated patients managed by centers of Italian Federation of anticoagulation clinics (AC). ⋯ However, thrombotic complications fell drastically from 3.5 to 0.53% pt-yrs (p < 0.01), with lower mortality (p = 0.01). VKA-treated patients monitored in Italian AC have good clinical results, with low bleeding and thrombotic complications rates. Important changes in the treated population and improvement in thrombotic complications are detected compared with the ISCOAT-1996/7 study.
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Acute bacterial meningitis is rare, but can be fulminant unless rapidly evaluated and treated. The aim of this study was to evaluate whether serum procalcitonin (PCT) levels could predict unfavorable outcomes of bacterial meningitis. We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 604 meningitis patients from the emergency department (ED) of our tertiary care, university-affiliated hospital over a five-year period. ⋯ As assessed using receiver operating characteristic curves for an unfavorable outcome, the area under the PCT curve was 0.708 (95 % CI 0.58-0.84, p < 0.01). When the PCT cutoff value was ≥1.10 ng/mL, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value and negative predictive value for an unfavorable outcome were 75, 70, 62, and 81 %, respectively. An association between the serum PCT level and an unfavorable outcome is observed.
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Emergency department (ED) overcrowding remains a significant problem in many hospitals, and results in multiple negative effects on patient care outcomes and operational metrics. We sought to test whether implementing a quality improvement project could decrease ED LOS for trauma patients requiring an ICU admission from the ED, specifically by directly admitting critically ill trauma patients from the ED CT scanner to an ICU bed. This was a retrospective study comparing patients during the intervention period (2013-2014) to historical controls (2011-2013). ⋯ After controlling for APACHE II score, there was no difference in mortality between the two cohorts (OR = 0.49, p = 0.28). Expedited admission of critically ill trauma patients immediately following CT imaging significantly reduced ED LOS by 3.82 h (229 min), without a change in ICU LOS, hospital LOS, or mortality. Further studies are needed to assess the impact of expedited admission on morbidity and mortality.
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Review
The current understanding of trauma-induced coagulopathy (TIC): a focused review on pathophysiology.
The emergency management of acute severe bleeding in trauma patients has changed significantly in recent years. In particular, greater attention is now being devoted to a prompt assessment of coagulation alterations, which allows for immediate haemostatic resuscitation procedures when necessary. The importance of an early trauma-induced coagulopathy (TIC) diagnosis has led physicians to increase the efforts to better understand the pathophysiological alterations observed in the haemostatic system after traumatic injuries. ⋯ In major traumas, coagulopathic bleeding stems from a complex interplay among haemostatic and inflammatory systems, and is characterized by a multifactorial dysfunction. In the abundance of biochemical and pathophysiological changes occurring after trauma, it is possible to discern endogenously induced primary predisposing conditions and exogenously induced secondary predisposing conditions. TIC remains one of the most diagnostically and therapeutically challenging condition.