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[Acute precordial pain: 100 cases in 3 years]
A Garaikoetxea1, E Vinyoles, C Pareja
1CAP La Mina, Sant Adrià de Besòs, Barcelona.
Objective:
To find the effectiveness of diagnoses of acute precordial pain seen as an emergency at our centre.
Design:
Observational, descriptive and retrospective study.
Setting:
Urban primary care centre.
Patients:
The 100 most recent patients who attended as an emergency with their first episode of acute precordial pain were included.
Study Period:
December 1994 to March 1998. Home visits, patients without medical records and those seen on repeated attendance for precordialgia were excluded.
Measurements And Main Results:
The emergency diagnosis and the diagnosis recorded afterwards in the clinical history of 100 people with acute precordialgia, aged 54.9 (16.7 years; 56% [n = 56] women), were gathered. Ischaemic cardiopathy (41%, n = 41) and mechanical precordialgia (36%, n = 36) were the most common initial diagnoses. We found 66.6% sensitivity and 81.4% specificity in the detection of ischaemic cardiopathy. The proportion of diagnostic errors was not linked to the pathological history of anxiety, ischaemic cardiopathy or oesophageal disease.
Conclusions:
41% of precordialgias are diagnosed as presumably ischaemic and are potentially serious, although only 50% of them are confirmed as such. Our sensitivity in their diagnosis is comparable to that of other studies.