The latest output from the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network is a clinical decision instrument intended to assist clinicians in managing pediatric blunt abdominal trauma.
Like previous PECARN studies, this is a multi-center, prospective, observational study conducted in tertiary pediatric emergency departments. This study enrolled 12,044 children with blunt trauma and prospectively collected structured data regarding their mechanism, external injuries, and physiologic variables. Using the magic of statistical partitioning, the authors derived a decision instrument for use in risk-stratifying a patient as “very low risk for intra-abdominal injury requiring acute intervention.” If the patient meets all criteria, the prediction rule is 97.0% sensitive, missing 6 out of 203 abdominal injuries.
This is critically valuable data – but, as a decision-instrument in a zero-miss environment, I’m not sure if it helps. The authors note that use of their CT decision-instrument actually increased resource utilization if retrospectively applied to the derivation cohort, if the requirement is held that a patient be negative for every variable. If the threshold is raised to 1 or 2 variables present, then sensitivity drops to 82% and 77%, respectively. Only about half received a CT scan, and a small percentage were lost to follow-up – though, given the outcome of “injuries requiring intervention”, the methodology is reasonable. However, because intervention-requiring injuries only represented 26% of all radiographically-identified intra-abdominal injuries, this study is still going to be ignored out-of-hand by folks who want to identify all injuries, not just intervention-requiring injuries. After all, the grade 1 splenic laceration may be intervention-free, but remains important regarding activity restrictions to prevent future morbidity.
The authors also note these findings require external validation – wherever they’re going to find another pedatric emergency care network to enroll 12,000 patients!
“Identifying Children at Very Low Risk of Clinically Important Blunt Abdominal Injuries”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23375510
UTI: Yet Another Windmill?
Medicine is full of windmills re-imagined as dragons – and two of the most prominent voices of reason in Emergency Medicine are David Newman and Jerome Hoffman. This skeptical take on pediatric urinary tract infections is David Newman’s latest, which covers content reflective of his SMART EM podcast on the same topic.
The premise of his argument is rather straightforward:
- There’s substantial overlap between UTI and asymptomatic bacteruria, leading to overdiagnosis.
- Even when the diagnosis is correctly made, prompt treatment does not prevent complications.
The complications in question are urosepsis and renal scarring. Urosepsis, in David’s literature review only results from urinary tract infections from the otherwise immunosuppressed, or in infants with congenital anomalies. Renal scarring, purportedly from pyelonephritis, has little or controversial evidence in supporting antibiotic use from preventing it.
This will be published in an upcoming issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine.
“Pediatric Urinary Tract Infection: Does the Evidence Support Aggressively Pursuing the Diagnosis?”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23312370
Don’t Waste the Saline
This is a study that follows-up and confirms the prior “mythbusting” literature regarding the management of minor soft-tissue lacerations in the ED. Specifically, this article evaluates the need for wound irrigation with sterile saline ($) as compared with tap water (free).
Unsurprisingly – and consistent with prior literature – this relatively contemporary study of 663 patients at Stanford University hospitals shows no difference in subsequent rates of wound infection, regardless of irrigation solution. The sterile saline group suffered 6.4% (9.1 to 3.7%) subjective wound infections in follow-up, compared to 3.5% (5.5 to 1.5%) infections in the warm tap water irrigation. A few patients were lost to follow-up, and the study has some generalizability limitations due to predefined exclusion criteria – frequently seen ED comorbidities such as diabetes, alcoholism, and immunocompromise were excluded.
But, it’s another piece of the puzzle that tells us suturing of uncomplicated wounds needs not be made more complicated. There’s no evidence to suggest that anything more than tap water, absorbable sutures, and non-sterile techniques are needed for optimal patient outcomes.
“Water is a safe and effective alternative to sterile normal saline for wound irrigation prior to suturing: a prospective, double-blind, randomised, controlled clinical trial”
http://bmjopen.bmj.com/content/3/1/e001504.full
MOPETT – Half-Dose tPA for PE
It’s not very often I read an article and decide to I’d like to incorporate it into my practice. EMCrit covered this last month, but I reserved judgement until I had a chance to read the primary literature for myself.
This is the MOPETT trial – half-dose (?”safe dose”) tPA for “moderate” pulmonary embolism. We already know what to do for “massive” PE – full-dose thrombolytics when not otherwise contraindicated. However, the data for full-dose thrombolytics in “submassive” PE is less conclusive.
These authors enrolled relatively ill PE patients – tachypneic, hypoxic, tachycardic patients with >70% thrombotic occlusion of lobar or main pulmonary arteries – but did not apply regularly applied measures of “submassive” – RV dysfunction, elevated troponins, elevated BNP. Their primary outcome was long-term development of pulmonary hypertension, with mortality and bleeding as their secondary outcomes. They dosed tPA at 50mg, rather than 100mg – 10mg bolus and 40mg infusion.
Their two cohorts were rather well matched. Outcomes favored the thrombolysis group, with 16% subsequent pulmonary hypertension compared with 57% in the control group. Mortality, recurrent pulmonary embolism, and bleeding complications were similar and at rates too low to detect a difference given the power of the study.
I’d like to start doing this. I wish they published the troponin/BNP/RV dysfunction rates in the two cohorts to provide better context with the other submassive literature. I also would have preferred to see this study registered with clinicaltrials.gov. But, in a nice change, none of the authors declare any conflicts of interest!
“Moderate Pulmonary Embolism Treated With Thrombolysis (from the “MOPETT” Trial)”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23102885
Etomidate, Safe for Sepsis?
Sadly, the jury is still out. Just months after Critical Care Medicine published the systematic review demonstrating an association between use of etomidate and mortality in sepsis, now they’re back with a retrospective data-mining expedition that draws the opposite conclusion.
This is a multi-center prospective registry of critically ill patients entered into a research database who were retrospectively data-mined for septic, intubated patients. Of the 42,000 patients in the database, approximately 2,000 met this definition, and about half were identified as receiving etomidate as their induction agent. In their cohort, there was no in-hospital mortality difference between the patients who received etomidate and the patients who received a different induction agent for intubation.
Unfortunately, as an observational, retrospective study of imperfectly matched cohorts, there are far too many uncontrolled confounders to base clinical practice on these findings. Studies such as these, even robust, prospective cohorts, are capable of doing little more than suggesting a hypothesis contrary to the findings of prior work.
If you believe etomidate has a chance to harm patients in sepsis, this doesn’t change your practice.
“Single-Dose Etomidate Is Not Associated With Increased Mortality in ICU Patients With Sepsis: Analysis of a Large Electronic ICU Database”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23318491
Copy & Paste Medicine
Mostly unrelated to Emergency Medicine – but an interesting descriptive study of a downstream phenomenon I see on a frequent basis.
For example, I’ll intermittently follow-up a patient to see how they fared as an inpatient. I’ll read the inpatient documentation, consultant reports, etc. – and find the tiny EM HPI perpetuated throughout the chart with minimal modification. This anecdotal experience is backed up by these authors who used text-compare software to identify copied passages in daily progress notes from an ICU setting. In this ICU at MetroHealth in Cleveland, 82% of resident notes copied at least >20% of the text from the previous days’ progress note – and copied 55% of the prior content on average. Attending notes were slightly less frequently copied (74%), but tended to copy more content (61%).
There’s no conclusive data regarding whether this copy/paste practice affects patient outcomes, but it’s an interesting symptom of evolving medical care and documentation in the EHR era. I hope that, as HIT evolves, documentation tools trend towards encouraging concise, effective communication, rather than this sort of (likely ineffective) chart bloat.
“Prevalence of Copied Information by Attendings and Residents in Critical Care Progress Notes”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23263617
New ACEP tPA Clinical Policy
If you’re still skeptical about the use of tPA in stroke patients – too bad. If you’re not on the bus, it would seem now you’re under it. ACEP has published their new Clinical Policy regarding tPA use in the most recent issue of Annals of Emergency Medicine. tPA should be offered to folks in the 0-3 hour window who meet NINDS criteria as a Level A recommendation. This is based on the following Class I evidence:
- Two studies that are negative for benefit (ECASS, ATLANTIS)
- The post-hoc analysis of ATLANTIS B with 61 patients,
- NINDS
The Level B recommendation is that tPA be considered for use off-label in the 3-4.5 hour window, based on ECASS III.
If you’ll travel backwards in time a couple days (by scrolling down), you’ll see I did a quick review of two articles concerning the “trustworthiness” of clinical practice guidelines. The Institute of Medicine names eight criteria – and, for the most part, this guideline does OK. It does, unfortunately, fare less well at the conflict of interests declared:
- Dr. Smith – Served on scientific advisory board for Genentech.
- Dr. Gronseth – Speakers’ bureau for, and honoraria from, Boehringer Ingelheim.
- Dr. Messe – Former speakers’ bureau for Boehringer Ingelheim.
Three out of eight guideline writers directly involved with the pharmaceutical manufacturer. As far as indirect support, however, if they wanted to be more transparent, Dr. Edlow, Dr. Jagoda, Dr. Stead, Dr. Wears, and Dr. Decker also ought to have disclosed their association with the Foundation for Education and Research in Neurologic Emergencies – supported by multitudinous pharmaceutical manufacturers, including Genentech.
If you’re irritated that pharmaceutical manufacturers are helping write our clinical guidelines, make your voice heard.
“Clinical Policy: Use of Intravenous tPA for the Management of Acute Ischemic Stroke in the Emergency Department”
What Are “Trustworthy” Clinical Guidelines?
This short article from JAMA and corresponding study from Archives is concerned with advising practicing clinicians on how to identify which clinical guidelines are “trustworthy”. This is a problem – because most aren’t.
The JAMA article paraphrases the eight critical elements in the 2008 Institute of Medicine report required to generate a “trustworthy” article, such as systematic methodology, appropriate stakeholders, etc. Most prominently, however, several deal specifically with transparency, including this paraphrased bullet point:
- Conflicts of interest: Potential guideline development group members should declare conflicts. None, or at most a small minority, should have conflicts, including services from which a clinician derives a substantial proportion of income. The chair and co-chair should not have conflicts. Eliminate financial ties that create conflicts.
The Archives article cited by the JAMA article reviews over 100 published guidelines for compliance with the IOM. The worst performance, by far, was compliance with conflicts of interest, and notes that 71% of committee chairpersons and 90.5% of committee co-chairpersons declared COI – when declarations were explicitly stated at all. Overall, less than half of clinical guidelines met more than half of the IOM recommendations for “trustworthiness”.
Sadly, another dismal addition to the all-too-frequent narrative describing the rotten foundation of modern medical practice.
“How to Decide Whether a Clinical Practice Guideline Is Trustworthy”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23299601
“Failure of Clinical Practice Guidelines to Meet Institute of Medicine Standards”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23089902
Lactate – Is There Any Death It Doesn’t Predict?
Turns out – apparently, no!
Continuing the run on pulmonary embolism articles, we find that – in addition to all the things we know prognosticates increased mortality in PE patients – elevated plasma lactate levels also predict poor outcomes. This is generally unsurprising, because elevated lactate levels are associated with increased mortality, even in unselected ED patients. What is interesting, however, is that lactate levels >2 mmol/L were more associated with 30-day mortality than shock/hypotension, hypoxia, or right-ventricular dysfunction. It’s a small cohort, but it’s a reasonable finding, regardless.
However, what’s sort of odd regarding the Editor’s Summary for this article is that it specifically mentions the lactate level does not outperform a simplified pulmonary embolism severity index clinical tool. The “truth” is that an AUC of 0.84 is better than an AUC of 0.71 – but that (0.72 to 0.95) and (0.60 to 0.83) overlap. Rather than trash the lactic acid level compared with the PESI, it might have been more accurate to simply state the current study was underpowered to confirm the advantage of lactic acid over PESI, and further research is necessary.
Can you buy stock in lactate level assays? It’s clearly the new favorite all-purposes prognostication tool.
“Prognostic Value of Plasma Lactate Levels Among Patients With Acute Pulmonary Embolism: The Thrombo-Embolism Lactate Outcome Study”
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23306454
http://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/23306454
Inadequate “Overuse” Reduction Strategies
This study was featured in Academic Emergency Medicine as one of their CME articles – theoretically, an article with additional value presented with incentives to motivate a closer reading of the content. I don’t mean to imply this is somehow a bad article – but it’s just interesting to step back out of the tunnel vision of statistics and boggle at the inadequacy of the current state of medicine.
This is a prospective study of patients evaluated for pulmonary embolism attempting to evaluate how many patients were “inappropriately” scanned. This definition of “inappropriate” scanning was determined by patients who were either PERC negative or had low-risk Wells’ score followed by a negative d-Dimer. Overall, of 152 patients, 11.8% were ultimately diagnosed with PE. However, the authors state that application of the PERC rule might have eliminated 9.2% of these scans while Wells’/d-Dimer would have obviated 13.8%.
While I certainly don’t discount the beneficial effect of even small reductions in the number of individuals evaluated for pulmonary embolism, these are still terrible numbers. 90% of CT scans for PE are negative? And using these decision instruments gets us to ~75% negative scans? This would be comically wasteful performance and innovative performance improvement in any other industry.
We pretty clearly need to do better.
“Overuse of Computed Tomography Pulmonary Angiography in the Evaluation of Patients with Suspected Pulmonary Embolism in the Emergency Department”
www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/m/pubmed/23167851/