Does This Dyspneic Patient in the Emergency Department Have Congestive Heart Failure?
Bibliographic record
Abstract
CONTEXT: Dyspnea is a common complaint in the emergency department where physicians must accurately make a rapid diagnosis. OBJECTIVE: To assess the usefulness of history, symptoms, and signs along with routine diagnostic studies (chest radiograph, electrocardiogram, and serum B-type natriuretic peptide [BNP]) that differentiate heart failure from other causes of dyspnea in the emergency department. DATA SOURCES: We searched MEDLINE (1966-July 2005) and the reference lists from retrieved articles, previous reviews, and physical examination textbooks. STUDY SELECTION: We retained 22 studies of various findings for diagnosing heart failure in adult patients presenting with dyspnea to the emergency department. DATA EXTRACTION: Two authors independently abstracted data (sensitivity, specificity, and likelihood ratios [LRs]) and assessed methodological quality. DATA SYNTHESIS: Many features increased the probability of heart failure, with the best feature for each category being the presence of (1) past history of heart failure (positive LR = 5.8; 95% confidence interval [CI], 4.1-8.0); (2) the symptom of paroxysmal nocturnal dyspnea (positive LR = 2.6; 95% CI, 1.5-4.5); (3) the sign of the third heart sound (S(3)) gallop (positive LR = 11; 95% CI, 4.9-25.0); (4) the chest radiograph showing pulmonary venous congestion (positive LR = 12.0; 95% CI, 6.8-21.0); and (5) electrocardiogram showing atrial fibrillation (positive LR = 3.8; 95% CI, 1.7-8.8). The features that best decreased the probability of heart failure were the absence of (1) past history of heart failure (negative LR = 0.45; 95% CI, 0.38-0.53); (2) the symptom of dyspnea on exertion (negative LR = 0.48; 95% CI, 0.35-0.67); (3) rales (negative LR = 0.51; 95% CI, 0.37-0.70); (4) the chest radiograph showing cardiomegaly (negative LR = 0.33; 95% CI, 0.23-0.48); and (5) any electrocardiogram abnormality (negative LR = 0.64; 95% CI, 0.47-0.88). A low serum BNP proved to be the most useful test (serum B-type natriuretic peptide <100 pg/mL; negative LR = 0.11; 95% CI, 0.07-0.16). CONCLUSIONS: For dyspneic adult emergency department patients, a directed history, physical examination, chest radiograph, and electrocardiography should be performed. If the suspicion of heart failure remains, obtaining a serum BNP level may be helpful, especially for excluding heart failure.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one teacher head, not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".