Tamingthesru
To Appendectomy or Not to Appendectomy: The Alvarado Score
Appendicitis is the most common surgical emergency that emergency physicians encounter each year. The prevalence of appendicitis in the US is estimated at 7%, with an incidence of 9.38 per 10,000 people annually [1,2]. Appendicitis shares many signs, symptoms, and laboratory features with other acute medical and surgical conditions, including diverticulitis, nephrolithiasis, and ovarian pathologies like tubo-ovarian abscess and ovarian torsion. Diagnostic tools such as the Alvarado score are designed to help emergency clinicians sharpen their diagnostic acumen by stratifying the likelihood of appendicitis based on scoring systems
Diagnostics: Flex your D Dimer
In times of COVID, a Dimer of 3000 is nothing to look twice about, however there was an earlier (and future) time where the D Dimer is the hallmark of pulmonary embolism risk stratification. Dr. Comiskey breaks how how this once dichotomous tool has recent data to increase its specificity in elderly patients, pregnant patients and those with low pretest risk factors. Take a look, and when this whole pandemic is over your quiver will be fuller of Dimer tips.
Yeah, it's Pneumonia, But How Bad is it Really?
According to the American Thoracic Society (ATS) in 2018, 1 million patients required hospitalization for pneumonia and there were 50,000 associated deaths. Pneumonia was the leading cause of sepsis and septic shock and not surprisingly therefore qualified in the top 10 most expensive inpatient hospitalizations.(1) Given these findings, some have sought opportunity to develop mechanisms to assess and safely triage pneumonia patients to either inpatient or outpatient treatment strategies based upon pneumonia severity scores. In October 2019, the Infectious Diseases Society of America (IDSA) in conjunction with the ATS published recommendations for the assessment, treatment and disposition of immunocompetent adult patients with community acquired pneumonia which included several clinical decision rules also known as pneumonia severity scores.(2) The recommended decision rules and several associated, emerging tools are reviewed here.