Research and Reviews in the Fastlane 036

This study found that a high percentage (49%) of patients with serious adverse outcomes after an ED visit for COPD were not initially admitted to the hospital. The authors used logistic regression to derive a decision instrument to aid in determining which patients with COPD exacerbation should be admitted based on risk stratification. The study does not show that admission improves outcomes but the instrument may prove useful for risk stratification if it is prospectively validated. Recommended by: Anand Swaminathan Emergency Medicine, Critical care, Anaesthetics Barends CRM ,Absalom AR. Tied up in science: unknotting an old anaesthetic problem. BMJ 2013;347:f6735. PubMed ID: 24335667 Anyone who has transferred a patient – whether from ED to CT, between theatre & ICU or between institutions will be familiar with one of the universal laws of transfer medicine – cables and lines will inevitably become tangled.But why?Clever physicists and topological mathematicians have the answer, with knot formation a function of the length of lines and their movement. It’s not exactly string theory in the sense of cosmology and quantum physics – but it’s highly relevant to anyone caring for a critical patient with multiple lines…A deeper dive for the maths geeks can be found here“Based on the observation that long, stiff strings tend to form a coiled structure when confined, we propose a simple model to describe the knot formation based on r...
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