Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
-
Multicenter Study Observational Study
Diagnostic performance of S100B as a rule-out test for intracranial pathology in head-injured patients presenting to the emergency department who meet NICE Head Injury Guideline criteria for CT-head scan.
Traumatic brain injury is a common ED presentation. CT-head utilisation is escalating, exacerbating resource pressure in the ED. The biomarker S100B could assist clinicians with CT-head decisions by excluding intracranial pathology. Diagnostic performance of S100B was assessed in patients meeting National Institute of Health and Clinical Excellence Head Injury Guideline (NICE HIG) criteria for CT-head within 6 and 24 hours of injury. ⋯ Within 6 hours of injury, S100B performed well as a diagnostic test to exclude significant intracranial pathology in low-risk patients presenting with head injury. In theory, if used in addition to NICE HIGs, CT-head rates could reduce by one-quarter with a potential miss rate of <1%.
-
Several current guidelines do not include antiplatelet use as an explicit indication for CT scan of the head following head injury. The impact of individual antiplatelet agent use on rates of intracranial haemorrhage is unclear. The primary objective of this systematic review was to assess if clopidogrel monotherapy was associated with traumatic intracranial haemorrhage (tICH) on CT of the head within 24 hours of presentation following head trauma compared with no antithrombotic controls. ⋯ CRD42020223541.
-
Young infants with hypothermia presenting to the emergency department (ED) are at risk for serious bacterial infections (SBI), however there is no consensus temperature to prompt evaluation for SBI among these children. We sought to statistically derive a temperature threshold to guide detection of SBI in young infants with hypothermia presenting to the ED. ⋯ Young infants with SBI and IBI presented with lower temperatures than infants without infections. However, there was no temperature threshold to reliably identify SBI or IBI. Further research incorporating clinical and laboratory parameters, in addition to temperature, may help to improve risk stratification for these vulnerable patients.