Appendicitis in Three Courses
Fearless chief Ted has organized the first of our Tuesday Night Journal Clubs (with apologies to Sheryl Crow). The goal of these meetings is to informally discuss several relevant and provocative papers on a certain topic of interest in EM. Particularly, we wanted to give attendees a foundation in the literature, and some ammunition when dealing with other services. We picked a dinner theme, with an appetizer, main course, and dessert.
Our appetizer came from the classic JAMA Rational Clinical Exam series, “Does This Patient Have Appendicitis?” (Wagner et al. JAMA Nov 20 1996, Vol 276, No. 19, PMID 8918857). Some interesting and quotable tidbits from this comprehensive review:
- RLQ pain had a positive likelihood ratio of about 8, and negative LR of between 0 and 0.28
- Rigidity wasn’t very sensitive, but had a positive LR of 3.8
- Migration of pain had a LR of 3.2
- Psoas sign, rebound, guarding, nausea, vomiting, fever and anorexia had relatively unimpressive positive and negative LR’s. Having ‘no similar pain previously’ gave a negative LR of 0.32.
The main course and desert follows below!
