Chest pain in a pediatric emergency department: clinical assessment and management reality in a third-level Portuguese hospital
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Chest pain in children and adolescents is a common complaint in the emergency department (ED), being mostly benign. A thorough patient history and physical examination should be enough in most cases for its proper management. Regarding non-cardiac chest pain, anxiety plays an important role. Methods: Retrospective analysis of all admissions in a pediatric ED of a Portuguese third-level hospital with a chief complaint of chest pain between January and December 2018. Chi-square test was used to compare different etiologies, considering a significance level of 5%. Results: A total of 798 visits were included: 53.6% girls, 80.8% adolescents (mean age: 13years old). According to the Pediatric Canadian Triage and Acuity Scale, 77.7% was prioritized as level IV: less urgent; 65.3% reported associated symptoms including dyspnea (31.8%), cough (18.2%), and palpitations (16.1%). In physical examination, 45.5% had alterations: 62.8% with chest wall tenderness. Further investigation was done in 84% of patients: 62.4% electrocardiograms (altered in 14.7%), 52.6% chest radiographies (altered in 17.1%) and 8.9% cardiac biomarkers (altered in 12.7%). The 3 main causes of chest pain were musculoskeletal (33%), idiopathic (24.4%) and psychogenic (21.6%), with 1.1% of cardiac etiology. Less than 3% needed hospital admission and 18.9% were oriented to an outpatient consultation. 7.1% readmissions reported. When compared to other causes as a group, psychogenic chest pain presented a statistically significant association with female sex, adolescence, psychiatric antecedents, previous stressful event, and normal physical examination. Of these, <30% were oriented to a pedopsychiatry/psychology consultation. Conclusions: Opposing to the low priority level in triage, benign diagnosis found, and low hospital admissions, there was a high percentage of complementary diagnostic tests performed with few altered results. In psychogenic chest pain there was a low postdischarge referral. The authors highlight the importance of clinical algorithms to reduce unnecessary tests performed and readmissions and improve orientation and follow-up, particularly in psychogenic etiology.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.002 | 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 source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), 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".