Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine
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The COVID-19 pandemic has placed acute care providers in demanding situations in predicting disease given the clinical variability, desire to cohort patients, and high variance in testing availability. An approach to stratifying patients by likelihood of disease based on rapidly available emergency department (ED) clinical data would offer significant operational and clinical value. The purpose of this study was to develop and internally validate a predictive model to aid in the discrimination of patients undergoing investigation for COVID-19. ⋯ The derived predictive models offer good discriminating capacity for COVID-19 disease and provide interpretable and usable methods for those providers caring for these patients at the important crossroads of the community and the health system. We found utilization of the logistic regression model utilizing exposure history, temperature, WBC, and chest X-ray result had the greatest discriminatory capacity with the most interpretable model. Integrating a predictive model-based approach to COVID-19 testing decisions and patient care pathways and locations could add efficiency and accuracy to decrease uncertainty.
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Randomized Controlled Trial
Paracetamol or nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs or combination of both analgesics in acute post-trauma pain: a randomized controlled trial.
Nonsteroidal anti-inflammatory drugs (NSAIDs) and acetaminophen (also called paracetamol) are the most frequent analgesics used to relieve posttrauma pain in the emergency department (ED). However, the utility of combining both treatments is still controversial. We sought to explore the benefits of combining an NSAID with acetaminophen compared to acetaminophen alone, or NSAID alone, in the treatment of posttraumatic pain of the extremity after discharge from the ED. ⋯ This study found that the combination of a high-dose NSAID with paracetamol does not increase the analgesic effect compared to paracetamol alone. We also found that paracetamol alone is superior to high-dose NSAID alone for posttraumatic extremity pain.