A computerized tool to help emergency room physicians determine whether a patient is having a heart attack may not work as well among some racial and ethnic groups, according to research of almost 12,000 patients at nine medical centers.
"It's notorious that women and elderly patients have markedly different heart attack symptoms from the younger male patient," said Chadwick D. Miller, M.D., from Wake Forest University School of Medicine. "This study shows us that race and ethnicity also play a role in symptoms."
Results from the research, conducted at Wake Forest and eight other medical centers, are reported in the May issue of Academic Emergency Medicine. The researchers studied a computerized risk stratification tool, called the Acute Coronary Ischemia-Time Insensitive Predictive Instrument (ACI-TIPI), which is designed to predict whether a patient is having a heart attack. Although ACI-TIPI itself is not widely used clinically, its elements form the basis of many other risk assessment tools.
Read more...Medical News Today
Posted by gruwell at May 5, 2005 9:58 AM | TrackBack