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Abstract
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PURPOSE:
Altered mental status is common to alcohol intoxicated patients, resulting in difficulties to perform detailed physical examination and history taking. With this condition, the development of appropriate tools for evaluation was required. This study was conducted to investigate a better method for predicting the prognosis among alcohol intoxicated patients in the emergency department by modifying the Korean Triage Acuity Scale (KTAS).
Method:
We retrospectively reviewed the medical records of 1,155 alcohol intoxicated patients who presented to the ED between January and December of 2013. The correlation between admission and demographical characteristics of patients was analyzed. We applied the clinical values to KTAS (overdose category) and modified KTAS (alcoholic intoxication category). The efficiency of two triage methods was compared by using the receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve analysis.
Results:
Among these 1,155 patients, 201 were admitted and 954 were discharged. The sensitivity and specificity of the overdose category were 0.736 and 0.623, respectively. Those of the alcoholic intoxication category were 0.647 and 0.979, respectively. The area under ROC curves for overdose category and alcoholic intoxication category were 0.679± 0.020 and 0.813±0.021, respectively (95% confidence interval, p<0.001).
Conclusion:
This study showed that the sensitivities of the overdose category and the alcoholic intoxication category were similar. However, the specificity of the alcoholic intoxication category was higher than that of the overdose category. Therefore, the alcoholic intoxication category was superior to the overdose category in predicting the prognosis among alcohol intoxicated patients.
Language: en |