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Jack tackled a controversial topic at this month’s Journal Club — what’s the evidence for giving antibiotics within four hours for CAP patients? It’s a good question, because how well we perform at this task is a big part of how our hospitals are measured. Ineed, pneumonia antibiotic timing is one of JCAHO’s Core Measures and there are only more such metrics down the road — so we’d like to think that our funding depends on rock-solid science and proven benefits.

Well…

As Jack noted, the 4-hr policy is based primarily on four papers,

1) Kahn et al, JAMA 1990 Oct 17 264(15) 1969-73 with comments 1995-6

2) McGarvey et al, Quality Review Bulletin April 13(4) 124-30

3) Meehan, Houck et al.  JAMA 1997 Dec 17 278(23) 2080-4 

4) Houck et al, Arch Intern Med. 2004; 164(6):637-644.

It’s this last paper we’re going to discuss — a retrospective study derived from a national sample of medicare patients with pneumonia.  

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When I was preparing an M+M last fall, I came across this notable study called Management of Acute Undifferentiated Agitation in the ED: A Randomized Double-Blind Trial of Droperidol, Ziprasidone, and Midazolam . It’s by Martel et al (including Michelle Biros, who’s editor of Academic Emergency Medicine), and appeared in Academic Emergency Medicine in December 2005 (Vol 12, No 12, pp1167 – coincidentally, right after Dr. Richardson’s EMPATH study).

It’s a good study that we might otherwise overlook, because it came out on the eve of the ACEP guidelines for agitation management and thus, wasn’t included in that extensive lit review.

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This week in journal club, Matt reviewed a nice little trial submitted by a group of Texans to the Canadian Journal of Emergency Medicine. They studied IV dexamethasone in preventing benign headache recurrence (Can J Emerg Med 2006;8(6):393-400, PDF) – something I had never tried, but apparently has been bouncing around the neurology and EM literature for 20 years.

It turns out that migraines may not be simply a vascular disorder, but rather an inflammatory disease. And, as Matt pointed out, it’s very difficult to diagnose migraines; it might be simpler for us ED folk to say headaches exist on a continuum between tension and migraine, and maybe ED patients with primary headache would benefit from a steroid.

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In the growing backlog of articles and journal club presentations I’d like to write up, I came across this publication which was presented a few months back — Does End-tidal Carbon Dioxide Monitoring Detect Respiratory Events Prior to Current Sedation Monitoring Practices? from Burton, Harrah, Germann and Dillon in Academic Emergency Medicine 2006; 13:500-504. My notes on the presentation have long since disappeared (I believe it was given by… Tim?) but my interest in the topic was rekindled after a recent M+M.

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This month’s journal club presentation began with what I believe was a discussion of blood clots in Cro-Mags before touching upon late 19th century versions of CPR, the landmark closed-chest cardiac massage paper, and eventually, a comparison of ROSC (return of spontaneous circulation) in real patients vs. as seen on television. Chad then led the group in a discussion of a new meta-analysis by Xin Li et al appearing in a recent issue of Resuscitation (2006: Vol 70, pp31-36) on the topic of CPR with and without thrombolytics.

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This month in Journal Club, we continued our theme of prognostication papers as Corey reviewed two recent ones from Latha G. Stead’s group at Mayo.  One paper ran last year and is called “Initial Emergency Department Blood Pressure as Predictor of Survival After Acute Ischemic Stroke” (Neurology 2005, 65:1179:1183). The second paper is called “Impact of Acute Blood Pressure Variability on Ischemic Stroke Outcome” (Neurology 2006:66:1878-1881).

This is something I frankly hadn’t spent much time thinking about — all the emphasis in stroke guidelines and tPA admin has been about getting BP down into a safe range, not worrying about whose BP is too low. But the big result from the first paper was that a diastolic of < 70 mmHg, a systolic less than 155, or an MAP of less than 100 mmHg was associated with higher mortality at 90 days than those with higher BPs (even after adjusting for age, gender, NIHSS score, etc). The worst relative risk (RR) was for a diastolic less than 70; RR = 2.2 in that case, which the authors find is actually worse than the RR of having a diastolic over 105 (RR=1.9… How about that).   

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We continue to make our way through the recent pain management papers, once again turning to the August Annals (Vol 48, No 2). Chang, Gallagher et al. strike back with a second analgesia piece in this issue — from now on, Montefiore will be simply be known as the House of Pain. The paper’s called Safety and Efficacy of Hydromorphone as an Analgesic Alternative to Morphine in Acute Pain: An RCT (if you’re logged into the Sinai library, full text is here). It’s full of provocative hypotheses, good study technique, and fun historical trivia… more below!

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I wanted to highlight the NEJM’s new (well, 6 months old) internet feature, Videos In Clinical Medicine. You ought to be able to access these videos after logging into the Sinai library (with MSSM-ID and life number) and then heading over the NEJM’s recent videos page.

Many of the videos feature the work of Gary Setnik, MD, an early figure in EM. The most recent one (from Oct 26th, Vol 355, No. 17) is on basic laceration repair – so maybe it’s something you can show to your beleaguered 4th year med student while you’re busy with other things. Other videos may be more relevant to us, including thoracentesis, LP, A-line placement, and knee arthrocentesis. The videos can also be downloaded in formats for Palm OS, Windows, and iPod.

Clinicalcases.org, a very useful collection of links, videos, simulators and more, also has a page full of procedure video links, as well as some physical exam videos that may be worth brushing up on.  

If you’re aware of any other good online resources like this, let me know or share ‘em with Ted, who’s compiled a list of his own.

I’m finally getting around to the some of the good articles on ED pain management that appeared this summer. The first was in the August 2006 Annals of EM, an article by Gallagher, Esses et al. entitled, “Randomized Control Trial of Morphine in Acute Abdominal Pain.” The authors tested the oft-repeated dictum that morphine affects diagnostic accuracy, measuring pain on a 0-100mm visual scale in a prospective double-blind random trial, giving 0.1 mg / kg of IV Morphine sulfate or placebo (ouch!) with an endpoint of “diagnostic accuracy” (ie, comparing the provisional diagnosis made by an emergency physician in 15 minutes after the agent is given, vs. diagnosis at six or more weeks of followup.)

They randomized 78 patients into the morphine arm, 73 into the placebo group. After fifteen minutes, the patients who got morphine changed their pain rating from 98 to 65, on average, whereas the placebo group went from 99 to 97. Diagnostic discordance occurred 11 times in each group, meaning that accuracy wasn’t affected by analgesia.

The dictum to avoid analgesia in abdominal pain dates to a 1921 proclamation by Sir Zachary Cope — a good example of emminence-based medicine. Maybe this warning was appropriate in the age before antibiotics and CT scanners, but we now have eleven trials in the last twenty years showing that Cope doesn’t cut it.

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