Annals of emergency medicine
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Multicenter Study
Risk Stratification of Older Adults Who Present to the Emergency Department With Syncope: The FAINT Score.
Older adults with syncope are commonly treated in the emergency department (ED). We seek to derive a novel risk-stratification tool to predict 30-day serious cardiac outcomes. ⋯ Among older adults with syncope or near syncope of potential cardiac cause, a FAINT score of zero had a reasonably high sensitivity for excluding death and serious cardiac outcomes at 30 days. If externally validated, this tool could improve resource use for this common condition.
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Agitation and delirium are common reasons for older adults to seek care in the emergency department (ED). Providing care for this population in the ED setting can be challenging for emergency physicians. There are several knowledge translation gaps in how to best screen older adults for these conditions and how to manage them. ⋯ Five core principles were identified by the group that can help ensure adequate and thorough care for older adults with agitation or delirium: assess, diagnose, evaluate, prevent, and treat. This article provides background for and explains the importance of these principles related to the care of older adults with agitation. It is important for emergency physicians to recognize the spectrum of underlying causes of behavioral changes and have the tools to screen older adults for those causes, and methods to treat the underlying causes and ameliorate their symptoms.
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In the past decade, rapid advances in therapeutic target discovery in hematologic malignancies have led to many clinical studies demonstrating efficacy of novel agents. Between 2014 and 2018, Food and Drug Administration approvals of new drugs and agents have increased, with greater than 2 dozen novel agents. Rapidly identifying the risk profiles of these cancer therapeutics that may present with acute toxicities and understanding the timing, sequence, duration, and treatment of disease processes are the most important challenges faced by practitioners in emergency medicine, even in nononcologic centers. ⋯ In this Review Article, we discuss the most recent and clinically relevant developments in the arena of hematologic malignancies, further expanding on drug toxicities and their clinical presentations and offering suggestions for management. Specifically, we discuss immune-related adverse events after immune checkpoint inhibitor therapy (including myocarditis and hemophagocytic lymphohistiocytosis), chimeric antigen receptor-T cell therapy, cytokine release syndrome, chimeric antigen receptor-T cell-related encephalopathy syndrome, differentiation syndrome, sinusoid occlusion syndrome, QT-interval prolongation, and tumor lysis syndrome. Rapid advances in hematology and oncology will bring many new challenges for emergency health care providers in the near future; thus, the urgency to raise awareness among this community.
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The role of lactic acid and its conjugate base, lactate, has evolved during the past decade in the care of patients in the emergency department (ED). A recent national sepsis quality measure has led to increased use of serum lactate in the ED, but many causes for hyperlactatemia exist outside of sepsis. ⋯ Additionally, we review the evolving role of lactate in sepsis care. We provide recommendations to aid lactate interpretation in the ED and highlight areas for future research.