A Decade of Diagnostics in Emergency Care
When we saw in the last decade, I’d just finished my PhD looking to discover the ‘new troponin’. At the time, patients with suspected acute coronary syndromes (ACS) were routinely admitted to hospital to undergo …
A decade in review for Emergency Care. St Emlyn's
I hope you’ve had a very happy Christmas/holiday period, and that work hasn’t been too intense for you. As we close out 2019, we’re looking forward to a new decade of Emergency Medicine here in …
The Future of Diagnostics #stemlynsLIVE
Making diagnoses is arguably the most important aspect of our work in Emergency Medicine. Until we know something about the nature of a patient’s condition, we can’t make informed decisions about whether they need to …
Troponin and biotin: a lethal combination?
Imagine you’re treating a patient who presented with typical cardiac chest pain. The initial ECG showed subtle lateral ST depression that seemed to resolve on subsequent ECGs. You’re very concerned by the clinical picture and …
50 shades of black and white: the folly of dichotomy
In this quick post I’m hoping to get you thinking and asking questions about how we measure things in medicine. And I hope that, like me, it might change how you interpret information in your …
Emergency Medicine at 50: reflections on our progress
The Royal College of Emergency Medicine (RCEM) is celebrating a landmark in is history: the 50th birthday of UK Emergency Medicine. To mark this event, RCEM has been doing a number of things. There was …
Is cMyC the new troponin?
Anyone who reads the news is likely to have seen the recent paper in Circulation evaluating a new biomarker of acute coronary syndromes: cardiac myosin binding protein C (cMyC) . This paper has been covered …
Icatibant for ACE inhibitor induced angioedema
Patients presenting to the ED are tending to get older, have more co-morbidities and take more medications. As this happens, in my experience we seem to see more patients with complications of those medications. Something …
One high sensitivity troponin test to rule out acute myocardial infarction
This month I was honoured that a study I wrote with some terrific colleagues from Europe, Australia and the US has been published as the ‘Editor’s Choice’ in Academic Emergency Medicine. This was a secondary analysis …