From Kaiser Permanente:
A new Kaiser Permanente study shows a gradual shift over time has occurred in the way emergency department physicians evaluate and diagnose sudden, severe headaches.
“We were aware that more doctors across the country were starting to move away from recommending a lumbar puncture after an initial CT scan and were using CT cerebral angiograms instead,” said lead author Dustin G. Mark, MD, an adjunct investigator with the Kaiser Permanente Division of Research and an emergency medicine physician with The Permanente Medical Group. “We suspected the shift was happening within our own emergency departments and we wanted to get a sense of how big a change was taking place.”
The research, published in JAMA Network Open, is the first to look at recent changes in the use of headache diagnostic tests over time. The study included 198,109 patients treated at a Kaiser Permanente Northern California emergency department between 2015 and 2021 for a severe headache. None of the patients had previously been diagnosed with any type of bleeding in the brain.
The research team found that over the 6-year study period, the use of computed tomography (CT) cerebral angiography as a second test increased by 18.8% a year, while the use of lumbar puncture as a second test decreased by 11.1% a year.
Comentários