Active clinical trials for "Emergencies"

Objectives: to detect the mistakes and deficiencies of the forensic reports which was written and to detect the injury characteristics of the forensic cases applied to emergency service of a tertiary hospital.

Comparison of telemedical prehospital emergency care and conventional on-scene physician based care of hypertensive emergencies and urgencies. The adherence to current Guidelines should be researched.

Multicenter, prospective, uncontrolled study to evaluate variations in urinary concentrations of TIMP-2 and PCI IGFBP7 induced injection during a CT scan in intensive care patient.

CALIF study is a monocentric observational study which aim is to analyse the value of adding procalcitonin (PCT, a pre-hormon increased in bacterial infection and septicaemia) in the management of chemo-induced febrile neutropenia occurring in patient with solid tumour. Febrile neutropenia will be managed according to international guidelines. PCT will be dosed at initial presentation. Primary objective is to determine the optimal value of PCT for the detection of septicaemia in low risk (according to MASCC score). The investigators plan also to compare two risk stratification scores: the validated MASCC score and a recently developed score which includes PCT and other more objective items.

Sickle Cell Disease is a serious disease that is life-threatening for patients being homozygous for the SS form or heterozygous for the SC or bthal forms. The CHU Brugmann hospital currently regularly treats about 70 homozygous adult patients and this number is in constant augmentation. The age average of the patients is below 30. The hospital developed a close collaboration with the Queen Fabiola Kids University Hospital to optimize the transition of young sickle cell patients from the pediatric to the adult network. The emergency care of sickle cell patients remains a source of worry. Even with a correct treatment (Hydroxy-urea or exsanguineous transfusions), patients suffer from frequent sickle cell disease crisis when stress or infection cause hemolysis. The pain level is intolerable and causes emergency hospital admission (2 to 3 crisis per patient per year on average). The crisis are more frequent with poor compliance to the treatments. There are several obstacles to the rapid and optimal management of these patients: fear of causing addiction to heavy pain releaf products (high dosis of morphine) lack of biological parameters for the determination of the crisis severity. The prognostic value of the lactate dehydrogenase (LDH) level in a vaso-occlusive crisis was recently stressed while activation of the coagulation, translated by the elevation of various parameters including the rate of DD dimers, seemed associated with clinical complications. The deleterious role of increased oxidative stress has also been recently demonstrated in patients with sickle cell disease, opening new therapeutic avenues. This study aims to prospectively evaluate the management of sickle cell patients being admitted in the emergency department for a vaso-occlusive crisis. The level of satisfaction of the patients will be measured. The investigators will also evaluate the predictive value of several routine biological parameters regarding the severity of the crisis, including the values of nitrous albumin (PNA) as marker of oxydative stress. This last dosage will be made in collaboration with the team of Dr Wayenberg and Pr Bottari in Grenoble.

Braunwald defines dyspnoea as an abnormally uncomfortable awareness of breathing. Breathing discomfort, and its varying degrees of severity, is the one of the most disturbing symptoms patients can experience; and it is one of the main complaints in the patients presenting to the Emergency Department (ED). Dyspnea has a variety of underlying etiologies, like cardiac, pulmonary or metabolic etiologies or a combination of them, since several diseases can cause dyspnea like for instance heart failure (HF), asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD). Acute heart failure syndrome (AHFS) is collectively defined as a gradual or rapid change in heart failure (HF) signs and symptoms resulting in a need for urgent therapy. Heart failure (HF) is one of the most important causes of morbidity and mortality in the industrialized world. The prevalence of symptomatic HF is estimated to range from 0.4 to 2.0% in general European population. The incidence increases rapidly with age, and in Europe. Characteristics, clinical presentation, treatment, and outcomes of HF patients admitted to hospital have been adequately described, in Europe and in the United States. The Euro Heart Failure Survey (EHFS) I with 11 327 patients described the demographics of acutely hospitalized HF patients. The ADHERE registry has data on over 100 000 hospitalizations for AHF from the USA. In-hospital mortality was 4 and 7%, in ADHERE and EHFS I, respectively. This same sensation of breathlessness is what also drives patients with asthma and chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) to the ED. Chronic obstructive pulmonary disease (COPD) exacerbation accounts for approximately 1.5 million ED visits in the United States per year. It is the third most common cause of hospitalization, with an estimated 726 000 hospitalizations in 2000 in the USA. Previous studies have demonstrated important differences between guideline recommendations and actual management of COPD exacerbation, either in the ED or during hospitalization. The diagnosis in front of a dyspneic patient in the ED remains a challenge, because of a low sensitivity of the clinical signs associated with the aging of the population and the variety of underlying diseases. Little is known about the Epidemiology of dyspneic patients in the ED at the European level. Diagnosis, prevalence and treatment of the patients may vary among European countries.

LUNG ULTRASOUND IN THE MANAGEMENT OF DISPNEIC PATIENTS IN EMERGENCY DEPARTMENT Introduction This is a prospective randomized trial realized in the Emergency Department of the University Hospital of Siena, Italy. Dyspnea is one of the most common causes worldwide of admission to the Emergency Department (ED) and acute heart failure (AHF) is a major cause of serious morbidity and death in such population, above all in elderly patients. Incidence rate is significantly higher in men than in women, in Europe it increases with age from 1.4/1000 person-years in subjects aged 55-59 years to 47.4/1000 person-years in those aged 90 years or older. The age-adjusted prevalence of AHF in the United States averages 36 cases per 100,000 of the population and accounts for 10,000 deaths annually. In clinical practice this symptomatology is usually investigated in the pre-hospital phase only with history and physical examination; in the ED blood gas analysis (BGA), laboratory tests and chest X-rays can be performed as primary exams. BNP and NT pro-BNP are now considered reliable biochemical markers to distinguish cardiogenic from pulmonary etiology, both for their diagnostic and prognostic value. On the other hand, these biomarkers are affected by a "grey zone" of uncertainty, they are not available in all hospitals and their dosage samples are expensive: thus we propose other tools to support the diagnostic process.

The main goal of this project is to help 9-1-1 emergency medical dispatchers save the lives of more cardiac arrest victims. The investigators will develop teaching tools to help the dispatchers recognize abnormal breathing that may indicate a victim as having a cardiac arrest. After training sessions, the investigators will see if dispatchers can get better at recognizing abnormal breathing, how often they give CPR instructions, and if use of the teaching tool will increase bystander CPR and the number of victims leaving the hospital alive.

Patients presenting to the emergency department (ED) currently face inacceptable delays in initial treatment, and long and costly hospital stays due to suboptimal initial triage. Accurate ED triage should focus not only on initial treatment priority, but also on prediction of medical risk and nursing needs to improve site of care decision and to simplify early discharge management. Herein, we propose a large prospective cohort study to optimize initial patient triage for (a) better determination of initial treatment priority, (b) overall risk and need for inhospital treatment and (c) early assessment of post-acute nursing needs.

In this study, we aim to identify risk factors for hemolysis in blood samples drawn in the ED.