Active clinical trials for "Chest Pain"

Aim To investigate if the proportion of correctly diagnosed patients at 4 hours after arrival to the Emergency Department (ED) increases when patients are diagnosed with standard diagnostics and focused ultrasonography examination (f-US) compared to standard diagnostics alone. Methods The investigators are medical doctors who work in the ED and who use f-US as a diagnostic tool. The patients are those arriving to the ED with symptoms of difficulties of respiration. All patients receive a f-US but only in the intervention group these results will be unblinded to the treating physician once he has made his 1. presumptive diagnosis . A final presumptive diagnosis has to be made within 4 hours from the patient´s admittance to the ED. The correct diagnosis is assessed by a blinded audit of the medical journal. This project holds the potential to develop evidence-based optimization of early diagnostic accuracy.

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a major health problem and its diagnosis remains a challenge for the emergency physician. The management of a suspected ACS is well codified, based on troponin assays, renewed if necessary. Conversely, the criteria leading to initiate a diagnostic procedure in chest pain to the Emergency department are unclear. The fear is, firstly, to miss a potentially life treating diagnosis and, secondly, exposing many patients to unnecessary examinations. The advent of highly sensitive troponin assays also increases the risk of over-investigation by a larger number of elevations of the biomarker in non-coronary circumstances leading to a prolongation of hospitalization and, possibly, unnecessary treatments and invasive investigations. CARE rule could help to streamline this first step. It is established by assigning a value from 0 to 2 to the items: Characteristic of pain, Age, Risk factors and ECG. The search for an ACS is not justified if the sum of points is ≤1 (negative rule) and, conversely, a troponin should be performed if the sum is > 1 (positive rule). Indeed, CARE rule corresponds to the first 4 items of the HEART score (the latter standing for troponin at admission) whose reliability has been demonstrated, a ≤3 income excluding ACS with a risk of false negatives <2%. A negative CARE rule always corresponds to a HEART score ≤3. Our study aims to confirm the interest of CARE rule to streamline the search for an ACS in chest pain as an observational European multicenter prospective study.

Nuclear stress testing evaluates whether the heart receives enough blood, by injection of a nuclear isotope during a stress on the heart that permits taking pictures of the heart muscle. A low-radiation-dose protocol for nuclear stress testing involves injecting less of the nuclear isotope than standard protocols, by utilizing a new, more efficient camera (called an Alcyone camera) which could decrease radiation dose to patients while still providing excellent clinical information. Subjects will undergo imaging under the Alcyone camera after undergoing stress testing with exercise or a standard medication simulating exercise, and then at rest if needed. Subjects will have follow-up to measure events occurring after the test, such as death, heart attack, unstable angina, repeat emergency department visit for chest pain evaluation, or repeat imaging needed to evaluation for coronary artery disease. Radiation doses and quality of the images from the imaging with the new protocol will be recorded to compare to those used in standard nuclear imaging protocols. The primary study hypothesis is that greater than 90% of patients who have a normal very low dose stress first myocardial perfusion scintigraphy (MPS) will be free at 3 months after study of death, nonfatal myocardial infarction, unstable angina, and repeat emergency department visit for chest pain evaluation or repeat anatomical or functional cardiac imaging.

Some myocardial infarctions (MI) occur as the first manifestation of atherosclerotic disease. Such MIs are important because of the high likelihood of missed opportunities for prevention. A recent analysis using CALIBER data estimated this proportion at 60%. Further to this research, another level of complexity can be added to improve our understanding of these MIs. This is the concept of a completely 'unanticipated' MI, which can be defined as: MI occurring as the first manifestation of atherosclerotic disease and without any traditional cardiovascular risk factors and without any prior chest pain. Such 'unanticipated' MIs cannot be foreseen by the medical profession and their frequency in the population is unknown. Therefore the aim of this study is to describe the distribution of previously diagnosed cardiovascular disease, cardiovascular risk factors and chest pain in patients with first MI. This will provide an estimate of the number of 'unanticipated' MIs and of the levels of risk factors in unheralded, compared to heralded MI.

Background: Chest pain (CP) and suspected heart attack is the second most frequent complaint among patients presenting to the emergency department (ED). Present workup involves in-hospital observation for 6 - 48 hours and requires significant resources including imaging tests, some of which are invasive and involve radiation and radio-contrast agents, which can be toxic to the kidney. CP can result from impaired blood supply to the heart muscle, which may result in impaired contraction of the heart that persists for several days. Bedside echocardiography with semi-automated speckle tracking strain analysis (2D strain) is a novel promising noninvasive tool for the evaluation of heart muscle contraction. 2D strain can be useful for evaluating patients with CP, since it can accurately detect minor impairment in heart muscle contraction that can identify patients with coronary artery disease (CAD) and impending heart attack (coronary arteries are the arteries supplying blood to the heart muscle). Working hypothesis and aims: The investigators hypothesize that a bedside echo study with normal 2D strain may allow quick and safe ruling out of a heart attack and significant CAD disease as the cause of CP. The main aim of the study is to validate the investigators preliminary findings in a large number of patients in order to establish whether a normal 2D strain can safely rule out a heart attack or life threatening CAD. Methods: In a large multi-center study 1200 patients presenting to the ED with acute CP of an unclear cause will undergo echocardiography as close as possible to presentation and not more than 24 hours from cessation of pain. Patients will undergo standard workup by the ED physicians. Standard echocardiographic findings, but not the 2D strain analysis, will be made available to the attending physician. Data from discharge letters, ECGs, blood tests, stress tests, nuclear imaging, heart CT and heart catheterization will be collected. A 6-month follow-up telephone interview will be performed to collect data on survival, heart attacks, re-hospitalization and revascularization (opening heart vessels blockages). 2D strain analysis will be performed off-line in a central laboratory to evaluate the ability of 2D strain to distinguish between patients with CP from heart disease and patients without life threatening heart disease that can be early released home safely. Expected results: The investigators expect, based on the investigators previous experience, that patients with normal 2D strain will have a very low probability of a heart attack and significant CAD. The investigators further expect these patients to have an excellent 6-month prognosis. This will allow their early and cost-effective discharge. Importance and Probable implications to Medicine: Reduction in ED patient load and a decrease in unnecessary hospitalizations for CP. Cost and resource savings and elimination of unnecessary imaging studies, some of which are invasive or involve radiation and contrast agents.

The investigators aim to compare the cost-effectiveness of CCTA and myocardial SPECT in patients with intermediate pre-test probability of CHD. To this end, patients with intermediate pre-test probability of CHD will be randomized 1:1 to either CCTA and myocardial SPECT. The patients will be analyzed for cost and also, for outcome.

The main aim of this trial is to assess the long-term prognostic value of different types of Factor XIIa in an unselected, single center series of 871 chest pain patients admitted to the emergency unit, employing blood samples collected at admission. The second purpose of this study is to assess the incremental prognostic value of B-type natriuretic peptide (BNP) and high-sensitive C-reactive protein (hsCRP). A third purpose of this study is to evaluate the prognostic impact of the Omega-3 Index which is a measure of eicosapentaenoic acid (EPA) and docosahexaenoic acid (DHA) relative to other fatty acids in the erythrocyte membrane.

The goal is to conduct a clinical pilot study to evaluate the use of a rotating multi-segment slant-hole collimator in the detection of myocardial defects.

We are doing a study to assess the impact of including patients in making decision regarding their own medical care in the emergency department. We will randomly assign them to either receive a decision aid or usual care. In doing this, we aim to increase patient satisfaction and safely decrease medical cost.

This is a prospective open label two arms clinical trial. ARM-A patients will receive the standard of care diagnostic test at Baptist Hospital Main (BHM), which includes Single Photon Emission Computed Tomography (SPECT) imaging, while ARM-B patients will be randomized sequentially into two groups; Group-1 will receive CT Angiography and CT myocardial perfusion with new Revolution CT scanner (General Electric Healthcare) while the Group-2 will receive SPECT imaging test; both groups of ARM-B at West Kendall Baptist Hospital (WKBH). The primary hypothesis is that the combined evaluation of CT angiography with CT myocardial perfusion is more efficient in detecting or excluding acute coronary syndrome resulting in early discharge and decrease length of stay of patients from the Emergency Department (ED) compared to a strategy with SPECT alone. The secondary hypothesis is that a strategy with CTA/CTP can reduce direct patient care costs and potentially improve patient outcomes in the same patient population when compared to a strategy with SPECT imaging alone. The main purpose of this study is to have a definite ED chest pain admission triage, which will help to reduce the length of stay and direct patient cost. This approach will reduce the economic burden in intermediate risk group patients as well. We had a Baptist statistician run the numbers. This study will provide important preliminary data to guide clinical implementation of CTP/CTA in clinical practice. We divided arm B into two groups as the CT protocol might be different at each hospital, so we want to reduce bias as a result of variation in clinical patterns in the different hospitals. Also, we kept 50 patients in arm A (Baptist hospital) to have a control group at the hospital level.