Journal Jam 9 – D-dimer to Rule Out Aortic Dissection

The EM Cases Team is very excited to bring you not only a new format for the Journal Jam podcast but a new member of the team, Dr. Rory Spiegel, aka @EM_Nerd an Emergency Medicine physician from The University Maryland Medical Center in Baltimore, the founder of the EM Nerd blog and the co-host of the Annals of EM podcast. The new format sees Justin Morgenstern, Teresa Chan, Rory Spiegel and Anton Helman doing deep dives into the world's literature on specific practical questions while highlighting some important evidence-based medicine concepts. The question we ask in this Journal Jam podcast: Is there a role for D-dimer testing in the workup of aortic dissection in the ED?

Journal Jam 4 – Low Dose Ketamine Analgesia

You’d think ketamine was in the ED drinking water! Not only has this NMDA receptor antagonist been used effectively for procedural sedation and rapid sequence intubation, but also, for delayed sequence intubation to buy time for pre-oxygenation, for life-threatening asthma as it has bronchodilatory and anxiolytic effects, for severely agitated psychiatric patients and excited delirium syndrome to dissociate them and get them under control; ketamine has even been used for refractory status epilepticus and for head injured patients as it is thought to have neuroprotective effects. The big question is: How effective is low dose ketamine analgesia for patients with moderate to severe pain in the ED as an adjunct to opiods? Low dose ketamine seems not only to help control pain, but it also has this almost magical effect of making patients indifferent to the pain. Pain is everywhere. And oligoanalgesia occurs in up to 43% of patients in EDs. Can we relieve suffering with low dose ketamine analgesia in the ED?....

Journal Jam 2: Small Bore Chest Tube and Outpatient Management of Pneumothorax

It makes sense that the treatment of primary spnontaneous pneumothorax would lend itself well to outpatient management, since patients are usually young and otherwise healthy, and the mortality and morbidity from these air leaks are really very low. Most patients would rather be managed as an outpatient rather than admitted to hospital and sending these patients home would probably end up saving the system resources and money. In this month's Journal Jam Podcast on small bore chest tube and outpatient management of pneumothorax, the highlighted article that Anton Helman and Teresa Chan discuss is Voison et al. on the “Ambulatory Management of Large Spontaneous Pneumothorax With Pigtail Catheters.” We hear from Michelle Lin, Seth Trueger, Heather Murray and the lead author himself, Stephan Jouneau. Questions posed include: In what ways is the use of small bore catheters with Heimlich valves for spontaneous pneumothorax better than needle aspiration? Is it necessary to repeat a CXR after placement of the catheter? Who should follow up these patients after they are discharged from the hospital? How can we minimize kinking and dislodgement of the catheter? and many more..... [wpfilebase tag=file id=523 tpl=emc-play /] [wpfilebase tag=file id=524 tpl=emc-mp3 /]

Journal Jam 1: Age Adjusted D-dimer with Jeff Kline and Jonathan Kirschner

In this first ever episode of the Journal Jam podcast, a collaboration between EM Cases, Academic Life in EM and The Annals of Emergency Medicine's Global Emergency Medicine Journal Club, Teresa Chan and I, along with Jeff Kline, Jonathan Kirschner, Anand Swaminathan, Salim Rezaie and Sam Shaikh from ALiEM, discuss the potential for Age Adjusted D-dimer to rule out pulmonary embolism in low risk patients over the age of 50. We discuss 4 key questions about the ADJUST-PE Study from JAMA in March 2014 including: Would you order a CTPA on a 60 year old woman with an age adjusted D-dimer of 590 ng/L? The problem until now has been that the older the patient, the more likely the D-dimer is to be positive whether they have a PE or not, so many of us have thrown the D-dimer out the window in older patients and go straight to CTPA, even in low risk patients. If you are a risk averse doc, this strategy will lead to over-utilization of resources, huge costs, length of stay, radiation effects etc; and if you’re not so risk averse, then you might decide not to work up the low risk older patient at all and miss clinically important PEs. expert peer reviewFor all the questions discussed on this podcast, the original Google Hangout interview from which this podcast was based, and the crowd sourced opinions from around world, visit the ALiEM website. Many thanks to all the talented people who made this podcast possible. Together, we're smarter!

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