The American journal of emergency medicine
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Comparative Study
Treatment of Acute Renal Colic in US and French EDs: Simulated Cases and Real Cases in Acute Pain Management.
To assess the prescribing patterns in acute renal colic in emergency departments in US and France, by comparing physicians' intended prescription practices with actual prescription data in a sample of emergency practitioners. ⋯ We showed clear differences between intended and real analgesic prescription practices for patients suffering from renal colic. Some differences exist for pain perceptions and treatments between US and France.
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With increasing utilization of computed tomography pulmonary angiography (CTPA) for the diagnosis of pulmonary embolism (PE), many patients undergo repeat CTs. ⋯ There is no risk-free period after an initial negative CTPA, and therefore, patients with clinical suspicion of PE should be rescanned even after a recent negative study. Even patients with multiple negative prior CTPAs have a measurable risk of subsequent PE. Established clinical prediction scoring systems must be used to triage the patients who need CTPAs.
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Assess the impact of scribes on an academic emergency department's (ED) patient-specific throughput. ⋯ Scribes failed to improve patient-specific throughput metrics in the first few months post implementation. Future work is needed to understand whether throughput efficiencies may eventually be gained after scribe implementation.
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Carbon monoxide (CO) poisoning is associated with cardiac injuries or manifestations, frequently attributing to direct hypoxic damage at cellular level. For this, the aims were to evaluate the role of serum pentraxin 3 (PTX 3), ischemia-modified albumin (IMA), and myeloperoxidase (MPO) as an early biomarker for cardiac damage when compared to cardiac troponin I (cTnI) and creatine kinase-MB fraction (CK-MB) in adult patients with acute CO poisoning. ⋯ Our results suggest that PTX, IMA, and MPO assays are not superior to cTnI and CK-MB in predicting a cardiac damage in patients with acute CO intoxication.
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Recently, dedicated cardiac computed tomography (CT) has been performed to rule out acute coronary syndrome in patients with chest pain equivalents. However, acute aortic syndrome (AAS) could mimic acute coronary syndrome. We investigated the reliability of CT with a limited scan range for the detection of AAS. ⋯ Aortic lesions outside of the cardiac CT scan range were not rare. Therefore, using a cardiac CT might not guarantee ruling out AAS completely.