ObjectiveTo evaluate the prognosis factors for early death (within 60 days) of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) patients for early identification and prevention of the disease. MethodsWe analyzed the information of AML patients who were admitted to the emergency department between May 2009 and July 2010, and analyzed their clinical data, such as gender, age, prehospital time, myocardial enzyme, electrocardiogram, complications, whether the patients had thrombolysis therapy, time of thrombolysis, end point observation and time of death, ect. Cox multivariate survival analysis was performed with the use of SPSS 18.0 software. ResultsSeventy-one cases were collected with one of them excluded for fragmented data. After analysing, we found that patients' age and isoenzymes of creatine kinase (CK-MB) level were prognosis factors for early death. Further analysis showed that the relative risk (RR) of age was 1.166 (P=0.023), and the RR of CK-MB was 1.001 (P=0.004). ConclusionPatients' age has predictive value for early death of AML. More attention should be paid to AML patients with advanced age. Detecting myocardial enzymes levels, especially the CK-MB level, is significant for predicting early death. Other indicators need to be further explored due to the possible limitation of our study.
ObjectiveTo systematically review the diagnostic value of procalcitonin (PCT) for tuberculous pleural effusion. MethodsWe electronically searched CNKI, WanFang Data, VIP, CBM, PubMed, The Cochrane Library and EMbase from inception to April, 2013, to collect the literature about the diagnostic value of PCT for tuberculous pleural effusion compared with gold standard (positive outcomes of mycobacterium tuberculosis culture). Two reviewers screened literature according to the inclusion and exclusion criteria, extracted data, and assessed the quality of included studies. MetaDiSc 1.4 were used to conduct the meta-analysis. ResultsEight studies were finally included. The results of meta-analysis showed the pooled sensitivity and specificity were 0.63 (95%CI 0.58 to 0.68) and 0.76 (95%CI 0.70 to 0.81), respectively. The positive likelihood ratio and negative likelihood ratio were 2.72 (95%CI 1.48 to 5.02) and 0.49 (95%CI 0.29 to 0.82), respectively. The diagnostic odds ratio (DOR) was 5.77 (95%CI 1.89 to 17.58). And the SROC AUC was 0.79. Heterogeneity was mainly derived from the QUADAS score and Begg's test showed there was no presence of publication bias. ConclusionPCT is a potential marker in the diagnosis of benign and tuberculous pleural effusion, which can be used to determine diagnosis identification of tuberculous pleural effusion.
ObjectiveTo discuss the present situation of emergency physicians' communicational ability and the intervention measures. MethodsWe investigated 66 students who participated in continuing medical education of "emergency physicians' communication skills training course" from 2010 to 2013. All students accepted systematic training. After the training, we did the investigation again, and then made a comparison before and after the training. ResultsA major 78.8% of the students in this training had never taken part in the training of communication skills before; 51.5% of the students thought that the improvement of communication ability could be achieved mainly through long-term accumulation of clinical experiences. Students' self-evaluation showed that communication problem occurred 2 times a year in 10.6% of them, 3 times in 22.7%, 4 times in 24.2%, and five or more times in 34.8%. Students' role playing score in the scenario training rose from 5.374±0.686 to 6.717±0.517 after the training, and the difference was statistically significant (P=0.024). ConclusionEmergency physicians lack knowledge of communication skills which needs to be improved. Through training, the skills can be improved significantly.