Brain CT requests from emergency department: reality

To evaluate the most common reasons for requesting brain CT studies from the emergency department and to calculate the prevalence of urgent acute pathology on this population group.

We reviewed brain CT studies requested from the emergency department during October and November 2018. We recorded the following variables: age, sex, reason for requesting the study, CT findings, use of contrast agents and reasons for using them, and, in patients who had undergone previous head CT studies, whether the findings had changed. SPSS was used for statistical analyses.

A total of 507 urgent brain CT studies were done (41.4% in men, 58.6% in women; mean age, 65.4±20 years). The most common reason for requesting the study was head trauma (40.5%); only 15.6% of these studies showed acute posttraumatic intracranial lesions. The second most common reason was focal neurologic symptoms (16%); only 16% of these studies showed recent ischemic infarcts or acute bleeding. No pathological findings were reported in 43.2% of the studies. The most common abnormal finding was small vessel disease (20%). Space-occupying lesions (both benign and malignant) were found in 3.9% of all patients.

Most brain CT studies requested from the emergency department showed no findings that would modify the management of the patient. Overuse of urgent brain CT increases the radiology department's workload and exposes patients to radiation unnecessarily.