Emergency medicine journal : EMJ
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Orbital fractures are a common, potentially vision-threatening presentation to an emergency department. Appropriate early management and referral by the emergency medicine practitioner has a significant role in preventing cosmetic and functional sequelae of orbital trauma. In this paper, we review the emergency, non-specialist management of traumatic injuries to the orbit.
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A shortcut review was carried out to see if acupuncture is an effective pain treatment in fibromyalgia. One Cochrane review and five subsequent papers and conference abstracts were identified. There are no large studies addressing this question and acupuncture has been compared with many different treatment modalities. Acupuncture may be a valid treatment for pain in fibromyalgia, but more research is required to validate this.
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A shortcut review was carried out to see if the abbreviated mental test score was better than other cognitive screening tools to diagnose delirium in the ED. Fourteen papers were identified reporting on 10 separate ED studies. Only one small study used the abbreviated mental test score and did not compare the diagnostic performance to any other test. There is very little published research on the use of the abbreviated mental test score in the ED setting.
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Observational Study
Use of S-100B, NSE, CRP and ESR to predict neurological outcomes in patients with return of spontaneous circulation and treated with hypothermia.
With the introduction of therapeutic hypothermia (TH), the prediction of neurological outcomes in cardiac arrest (CA) survivors is challenging. Early, accurate determination of prognosis by emergency physicians is important to avoid unnecessarily prolonged critical care with a likely poor neurological outcome. ⋯ Among the biomarkers, S-100B at 24 hours and NSE at 48 hours post-ROSC were highly predictive of neurological outcomes in patients treated with TH after CA.
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There is a perception that women are under-represented as speakers at emergency medicine (EM) conferences. We aimed to evaluate the ratio of male to female speakers and the proportion of presenting time by gender at major international EM conferences. ⋯ Male speakers exceed female speakers at major EM conferences. The reasons for this imbalance are likely complex and multifactorial and may reflect the gender imbalance within the specialty.