In this article published in JAMA Internal Medicine in July of last year, a group of emergency physicians reviewed 11,230 records of patients hospitalized for chest pain with 2 negative troponin tests, nonconcerning initial ED vital signs, and nonischemic, interpretable electrocardiographic findings to determine the incidence of patient-centered adverse events in the short term.
What is interesting and unique about this study is the shift from using MACE (which, as I have discussed before, includes somewhat-nebulously-patient-centered bad outcomes such as need for cardiac revascularization — this is an intervention, not a harm that occurred to a patient due to a lack of intervention) from using their more “clinically relevant adverse cardiac events” (of course requiring a new catchy acronym, CRACE): (1) life-threatening arrhythmia (ventricular fibrillation, sustained ventricular tachycardia requiring treatment, symptomatic bradycardia or bradyasystole requiring emergent intervention, and any tachydysrhythmia treated with cardioversion); (2) inpatient STEMI; (3) cardiac or respiratory arrest; and (4) death.
Another unique aspect of this study was the enrollment of patients who were sick who met their criteria discussed above– many other studies only considered “low risk patients” to be those without significant comorbidities or CV disease histories (e.g. history of CABG, multiple stents, diabetes, hypertension, etc) . They did exclude patients with LBBB or pacemaker rhythms on EKGs, which would have made identification of ischemia perhaps more difficult.
What did they find? Only four patients out of 7266 meeting the above criteria went on to have any of the primary endpoints. Of these, two were non-cardiac and two were possibly iatrogenic. This is a rate of 0.06% (95% CI 0.02-0.14%), which is much lower than many people would likely guess, and can help inform the discussion we can have with patients when arriving at a disposition. If I am practicing in a community such as the authors’, where short-term follow up with a cardiologist can be arranged, and a patient is reliable, I feel that this data can help me feel more comfortable discharging them with that plan rather than admitting to the hospital, if the patient is comfortable with this.
As Ryan Radecki wrote, the applicability of this hinges on tightly integrated follow up, and we cannot practice “catch and release” medicine. This is also only one data set, and requires prospective validation, and we need to acknowledge that this is not a zero-miss strategy (just like any strategy). That said, there are many potential downsides associated with admission, from costs and downstream sequelae of unnecessary invasive testing to iatrogenic harms, and this study will help better inform our conversation with patients about all of these issues.
