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Re-evaluation of the tympanic thermometer in the emergency department
1Department of Emergency Medicine, Silver Cross Hospital, Joliet, Illinois.
Study Objective:
A study was undertaken to re-evaluate tympanic temperatures using a commonly used portable infrared tympanic thermometer.
Design:
Temperatures were recorded sequentially at two body sites using an electronic digital thermometer and an infrared tympanic thermometer. The tympanic thermometer was set to the core equivalency setting.
Setting:
The emergency department of a Level 2 trauma center.
Type Of Participants:
Seventy-nine pediatric patients presenting to the ED.
Measurements And Main Results:
Mean temperatures in the tympanic and rectal temperature groups were 38.5 +/- 1.08 C and 38.8 +/- 1.02 C, respectively (P greater than .05). The overall correlation of rectal and tympanic temperatures was 0.93 (P much less than .001). Stratifying the data by age resulted in a weakened correlation for patients 3 months of age and younger. For all strata, the sensitivity, specificity, positive predictive value, and negative predictive value of the tympanic thermometer for predicting fever were 96.6%, 100%, 100%, and 90.1%, respectively; for patients more than 3 months of age, the values were 100% in all categories.
Conclusion:
Our findings indicate that the First Temp infrared tympanic thermometer accurately detected fever in a pediatric population more than 3 months old. Results were inconclusive in patients less than 3 months old.