BACKGROUND The incidence of hypertensive emergency in US emergency departments (ED) is not well established. METHODS AND RESULTS This study is a descriptive epidemiological analysis of nationally representative ED visit-level data from the Nationwide Emergency Department Sample for 2006-2013. Nationwide Emergency Department Sample is a publicly available database maintained by the Healthcare ...

OBJECTIVE I sought to determine if a combination of acupuncture and guided imagery could augment the conventional medical management of moderately severe or severe asthma. DESIGN This was an early-phase study with a convenience sample of self-selecting patients compared with self-year before, during treatment, and one year after treatment. SETTING PATIENTS were recruited from an outpatient ...

OBJECTIVE Children who require chronic mechanical ventilation via tracheostomy are medically complex and require prolonged hospitalization, placing a heavy burden on caregivers and hospital systems. We developed an interdisciplinary Ventilator Care Program to relieve this burden, through improved communication and standardized care. We hypothesized that a standardized team approach to the disch...

INTRODUCTION In 2007 wildfires ravaged Southern California resulting in the largest evacuation due to a wildfire in American history. We report how these wildfires affected emergency department (ED) visits for respiratory illness. METHODS We extracted data from a Kaiser Permanente database for a single metropolitan community ED. We compared the number of visits due to respiratory illness at t...

BACKGROUND Extreme ambient temperatures are an increasing public health concern. The aim of this study was to assess if persons with comorbid health conditions were at increased risk of adverse cardiorespiratory morbidity during temperature extremes. METHODS A time series study design was applied to 292,666 and 562,738 emergency room (ER) visits for cardiovascular and respiratory diseases, re...