Repositioning maneuvers for benign paroxysmal positional vertigo (BPPV) designed to induce otoconial movement in one canal can trigger and sometimes unwittingly treat BPPV in other canals. Patients with BPPV are best managed by precisely diagnosing the canal variant and using correctly performed, standardized testing and treatment maneuvers.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFNeurol Clin Pract
February 2025
Acute dizziness and vertigo are common emergency department presentations (≈4% of annual visits) and sometimes, a life-threatening diagnosis like stroke is missed. Recent literature reviews the challenges in evaluation of these symptoms and offers guidelines for diagnostic approaches. Strong evidence indicates that when well-trained providers perform a high-quality bedside neurovestibular examination, accurate diagnosis of peripheral vestibular disorders and stroke increases.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Diagnostic errors are the leading cause of preventable harm in clinical practice. Implementable tools to quantify and target this problem are needed. To address this gap, we aimed to generalize the Symptom-Disease Pair Analysis of Diagnostic Error (SPADE) framework by developing its computable phenotype and then demonstrated how that schema could be applied in multiple clinical contexts.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjectives: Dizziness is a common medical symptom that is frequently misdiagnosed. While virtual patient (VP) education has been shown to improve diagnostic accuracy for dizziness as assessed by VPs, trainee performance has not been assessed on human subjects. The study aimed to assess whether internal medicine (IM) interns after training on a VP-based dizziness curriculum using a deliberate practice framework would demonstrate improved clinical reasoning when assessed in an objective structured clinical examination (OSCE).
View Article and Find Full Text PDFBackground: Diagnostic errors cause substantial preventable harms worldwide, but rigorous estimates for total burden are lacking. We previously estimated diagnostic error and serious harm rates for key dangerous diseases in major disease categories and validated plausible ranges using clinical experts.
Objective: We sought to estimate the annual US burden of serious misdiagnosis-related harms (permanent morbidity, mortality) by combining prior results with rigorous estimates of disease incidence.
This third Guideline for Reasonable and Appropriate Care in the Emergency Department (GRACE-3) from the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine is on the topic adult patients with acute dizziness and vertigo in the emergency department (ED). A multidisciplinary guideline panel applied the Grading of Recommendations Assessment, Development, and Evaluation (GRADE) approach to assess the certainty of evidence and strength of recommendations regarding five questions for adult ED patients with acute dizziness of less than 2 weeks' duration. The intended population is adults presenting to the ED with acute dizziness or vertigo.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: Acute dizziness/vertigo is usually due to benign inner-ear causes but is occasionally due to dangerous neurologic ones, particularly stroke. Because symptoms and signs overlap, misdiagnosis is frequent and overuse of neuroimaging is common. We assessed the accuracy of bedside findings to differentiate peripheral vestibular from central neurologic causes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFDiagnostic errors in medicine represent a significant public health problem but continue to be challenging to measure accurately, reliably, and efficiently. The recently developed Symptom-Disease Pair Analysis of Diagnostic Error (SPADE) approach measures misdiagnosis related harms using electronic health records or administrative claims data. The approach is clinically valid, methodologically sound, statistically robust, and operationally viable without the requirement for manual chart review.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFObjective: To evaluate whether patients discharged to home after an emergency department (ED) visit for headache face a heightened short-term risk of stroke.
Background: Stroke hospitalizations that occur soon after ED visits for headache complaints may reflect diagnostic error.
Methods: We conducted a retrospective cohort study using statewide administrative claims data for all ED visits and admissions at nonfederal hospitals in Florida 2005-2018 and New York 2005-2016.
Background: Nystagmus identification and interpretation is challenging for non-experts who lack specific training in neuro-ophthalmology or neuro-otology. This challenge is magnified when the task is performed telemedicine. Deep learning models have not been heavily studied in video-based eye movement detection.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFJAMA Otolaryngol Head Neck Surg
May 2022
Objective: Smartphones have shown promise in the assessment of neuro-ophthalmologic and vestibular disorders. We have shown that the head impulse test results recorded using our application are comparable with measurements from clinical video-oculography (VOG) goggles. The smartphone uses ARKit's capability to acquire eye and head movement positions without the need of performing a calibration as in most eye-tracking devices.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFThis paper presents diagnostic criteria for vascular vertigo and dizziness as formulated by the Committee for the Classification of Vestibular Disorders of the Bárány Society. The classification includes vertigo/dizziness due to stroke or transient ischemic attack as well as isolated labyrinthine infarction/hemorrhage, and vertebral artery compression syndrome. Vertigo and dizziness are among the most common symptoms of posterior circulation strokes.
View Article and Find Full Text PDFStudy Objective: To assess if having a mental health and/or substance use disorder is associated with a missed acute myocardial infarction diagnosis in the emergency department (ED).
Methods: This was a retrospective cohort analysis (2009 to 2017) of adult ED encounters at Kaiser Permanente Southern California. We used the validated symptom-disease pair analysis of diagnostic error methodological approach to "look back" and "look forward" and identify missed acute myocardial infarctions within 30 days of a treat-and-release ED visit.
Background: Delayed diagnosis of cerebrovascular disease (CVD) among patients can result in substantial harm. If diagnostic process failures can be identified at emergency department (ED) visits that precede CVD hospitalization, interventions to improve diagnostic accuracy can be developed.
Methods: We conducted a nested case-control study using a cohort of adult ED patients discharged from a single medical center with a benign headache diagnosis from October 1, 2015 to March 31, 2018.
Objectives: The relationship between diagnostic intensity and quality of care has not been well-characterized at the hospital level. We performed an exploratory analysis to better delineate this relationship using a hospital-level diagnostic overuse index and accepted hospital quality metrics (readmissions and mortality).
Methods: We previously developed and published a hospital-level diagnostic overuse index.