Skin Conditions That Bring Patients to Emergency Departments

Abstract

his prednisone dose. There were no serious adverse events or laboratory abnormalities. Comment. Previous case reports (6 total patients in 3 reports 1-3) describe uniformly effective results for the use of etanercept in PV. Our randomized, controlled study suggests that the response to etanercept is heterogeneous, although the small sample size precludes definitive conclusions. We observed 2 meaningful responses in the 4 patients who received etanercept and completed the study, although the use of azathioprine 1 month before etanercept initiation confounds the results for 1 of these 2 patients. It is possible that a higher dose of etanercept (eg, 50 mg twice weekly) might have conferred additional efficacy. The apparent placebo response is complicated by concurrent initiation of topical therapy in one patient and a questionably meaningful improvement in the other. One weakness of our study is the lack of a well-validated end point-we noted cases of discordance between changes in lesion number and physician global assessment. Since this study was designed, an international consensus statementhasemergedregardingdefinitionsofdiseaseendpoints and response, 4 and, in addition, 2 novel outcome instruments for PV have been partially validated. 5

Which Dermatological Conditions Present to an Emergency Department in Australia?

“…Cellulitis was the most common condition (36.1%), consistent with previous studies [7, 10]. However, the prevalence of cellulitis may be misleading, as multiple studies have reported high rates of misdiagnosis of cellulitis in ED due the lack of familiarity with more specific dermatological diagnoses such as lipodermatosclerosis and contact dermatitis.…”

Urgent Consultations at the Dermatology Department of Basel University Hospital, Switzerland: Characterisation of Patients and Setting - A 12-Month Study with 2,222 Patients Data and Review of the Literature

“…One reason for the low prevalence of LTD or infections in or study is that most patients with LTD or infections have systemic symptoms that make them go to the ED instead of the DD [8,13]. As a consequence, several dermatology patients are admitted and treated in non-dermatology departments without any information to the DD.…”

“…The exact frequency of dermatologic diseases and characteristics of patients have been studied in limited settings; moreover most published data are heterogeneous [1,2,3,4,5,6,7,8,9]. Reasons for heterogeneity are dissimilarities in studied parameters, such as short-/long-time studies, different referral pattern, in-hospital setting [10], ambulant setting [5,11], urgent setting [1,2,4,5,6,7,8,12,13], non-urgent setting, mixed situations, or children only [14,15,16,17]. In addition, most studies were retrospective.…”

Dermatological conditions presenting at the Emergency Department in Siena University Hospital from 2006 to 2011

“…[5][6][7][8][9][10][11][12][13][14] The aim was to quantify and characterize cases to provide basic information for physicians and the national health system with a view to improving patient care and cost-effectiveness.…”