BACKGROUND Approximately 5% of patients with an acute coronary syndrome are discharged from the emergency room with an erroneous diagnosis of non-cardiac chest pain. Highly accurate non-invasive stress imaging is valuable for assessment of low-risk chest pain patients to prevent these errors. Adenosine stress cardiovascular magnetic resonance (AS-CMR) is an imaging modality with increasing appl...

INTRODUCTION Although many protocols are available in the field of the prehospital medical care (PMC), there is still a notable gap between protocol based directions and applied clinical practice. This study measures the rate of protocol adherence in PMC provided for patients with chest pain and loss of consciousness (LOC). METHOD In this cross-sectional study, 10 educated research assistants...

BACKGROUND The evaluation of hospitalized patients with chest pain and non-diagnostic electrocardiogram is problematic and the optimal cost-effective strategy for their management controversial. OBJECTIVES To determine the utility of myocardial perfusion imaging with thallium-201 for predicting outcome of hospitalized patients with chest pain and a normal or non-diagnostic ECG. METHODS On p...

acute chest pain is an important and frequently occurring symptom in patients. chest pain is often a sign of ischemic heart disease. chest pain due to suspected acute coronary syndrome (acs) is responsible for a large and increasing number of hospital attendances and admissions. current practice for suspected acs involves troponin testing 10–12 hours after symptom onset to diagnose myocardial i...

BACKGROUND Non-cardiac chest pain assessed by cardiologists in their outpatient clinics or by coronary angiography usually has a poor symptomatic functional and psychological outcome. Randomised trials have shown the effectiveness of specialist psychological treatment with those who have persistent symptoms, but such treatment is not always acceptable to patients and may not be feasible in rout...