Tactical Medicine News Blog

This EMU 365 video features Dr. Sean Caine on Headache Nightmares - the Big 5 diagnoses that aren't always picked up with the old plain CT-LP algorithm... The post EMU 365 Headache Nightmares with Sean Caine appeared first on Emergency Medicine Cases.

Background: Use of tranexamic acid (TXA), an antifibronlytic medication,  has certainly become popular for numerous indications (i.e. trauma, uterine bleeding, epistaxis).  Patients with hemoptysis, frequently come through EDs, and as an ED healthcare provider, I am unable to provide the definitive therapies of bronchial artery embolization and bronchoscopy for these patients at many of the institutions in which I work.  And, of course, it’s not like I can just put my finger on the bleeder. There is no real effective medical therapy for hemoptysis, other than antibiotics for infection.  I often find myself helpless with these patients as all I can do is transfer them to larger institutions where definitive therapies can be done.  Well hold on…It turns out inhaled TXA may be an option to reduce bleeding in patients with hemoptysis.  Thus far the evidence for this has  only been from small case series.  There have been no prospective studies evaluating nebulized TXAs effectiveness as an inhaled treatment for hemoptysis.  I have certainly used this treatment for post-tonsillectomy bleeding and have at times used it for hemoptysis, with great success, but it would be nice to see some evidence to support this practice.

A bedside urine test for a pesticide is positive as shown in the photo. What pesticide is being detected? Chlorpyrifos Diquat Glyphosate Paraquat

Welcome to the Acute Coronary Syndrome (ACS) Module! After carefully reviewing all relevant posts from the top 50 sites of the Social Media Index, the AIR Team is proud to present the highest quality online content related to ACS emergencies. 13 blog posts within the past 12 months (as of July 2018) met our standard of online excellence and were curated and approved for residency training by the AIR Series Board. We identified 2 AIR and 11 Honorable Mentions. We recommend programs give 5.5 hours (about 25 minutes per article) of III credit for this module.  

Background: Pulmonary embolism is the leading cause of death in pregnancy and the puerperium – accounting for nearly 20% of maternal deaths in the United States – making rapid and accurate diagnosis critically important for emergency physicians, OB/GYNs, and all who take care of these women on a regular basis. Diagnosis is made more difficult by the frequency of concerning and suggestive signs and symptoms in this population, particularly dyspnea (a common symptom in pregnancy related to an increase in progesterone levels) and tachycardia (as resting heart rate is typically expected to increase by up to 25% in normal pregnancy). While the use of the D-dimer in conjunction with a low pre-test probability for pulmonary embolism is well-established for ruling out PE in the non-pregnant population, pregnant women were excluded from studies that derived and validated models assessing pretest clinical probability of PE, and no specific tool to assess pretest probability is available in this setting. This lack of a pretest probability assessment tool and the lack of prospective data confirming the safety of ruling out PE on the basis of a negative D-dimer result have limited the adoption of the D-dimer test in pregnant patients. Indeed, the American Thoracic Society guidelines [1] recommend specifically against the use of D-dimer to exclude PE in pregnancy. The DiPEP study, published in the British Journal of Haematology, attempted to add to this literature base [2], and was reviewed here on REBEL EM. The DiPEP authors’ conclusion, that D-dimer should not be recommended for use in the diagnostic work-up of PE in pregnancy, was echoed in our review, however this study was likely fundamentally flawed in that it did not risk stratify patients prior to application of D-dimer testing, a critical step in all validated applications. Recently, a group of French and Swiss authors published a prospective diagnostic management outcome study for diagnosis of PE in pregnant women that sought to better define the role of D-dimer when paired with pre-test risk stratification. [3]