Emergency Physicians Research Common Problems in Proportion to their Frequency

Area of Science:

• Emergency Medicine Research
• Clinical Epidemiology
• Medical Informatics

Background:

• Emergency medicine (EM) research faces a scarcity, prompting calls for increased clinical investigation from leading organizations.
• Previous studies explored EM research funding and productivity, but the focus of EM researchers on specific patient conditions remained unknown.
• A hypothesis suggested EM research scarcity might stem from a tendency to study rare, high-morbidity conditions over common ones.

Purpose of the Study:

• To investigate whether emergency physicians preferentially focus their research on rare conditions.
• To compare the frequency of medical conditions presenting to emergency departments with the frequency of research conducted on those conditions by emergency physicians.

Main Methods:

• A retrospective review compared principal diagnoses from the National Hospital Ambulatory Medical Care Survey (1996-2006) with PubMed first-author publications by emergency physicians.
• Statistical analysis involved correlations and linear regression, using emergency department (ED) visits per diagnosis as the independent variable and publication count as the dependent variable.

Main Results:

• A strong positive correlation (0.85, P < 0.01) was found between the frequency of conditions presenting to EDs and the frequency of research on those conditions.
• Common ED diagnoses, including injury/poisoning and respiratory diseases, constituted 60.9% of principal diagnoses and 50.2% of published EM research.

Conclusions:

• Emergency physicians' research focus aligns closely with the prevalence of conditions encountered in the emergency department.
• The scarcity of EM research is not attributable to a skewed focus on less common patient problems.