Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
-
Outcomes following possible undiagnosed aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage: a contemporary analysis.
Existing literature suggests that patients with aneurysmal subarachnoid hemorrhage (aSAH) and "sentinel" aSAH symptoms prompting healthcare evaluations prior to aSAH diagnosis are at increased risk of unfavorable neurologic outcomes and death. Accordingly, these encounters have been presumed to be unrecognized opportunities to diagnose aSAH and the worse outcomes representative of the added risks of delayed diagnoses. We sought to reinvestigate this paradigm among a contemporary cohort of patients with aSAH. ⋯ In a contemporary cohort of patients with aSAH, we observed no statistically significant increase in the adjusted odds of death or unfavorable neurologic outcomes among patients with clinical evaluations for possible aSAH-related symptoms in the 14 days preceding formal diagnosis of aSAH. While these findings cannot exclude a smaller risk difference than previously reported, they can help refine decision analyses and testing threshold determinations for patients with possible aSAH.