Clinical utility of abnormal opacity overlying the vertebral column on lateral chest radiography.

Background: Chest radiography is an important component of the evaluation of patients with complaints referable to the chest. We sought to investigate the clinical utility of one particular finding on the lateral chest radiograph (CXR), namely, radioopacity obscuring the normal superior to inferior progression of vertebral radiolucency. A review of the literature yielded little published evidence to characterize the clinical utility of this finding to date.

Does this patient with headache have a migraine or need neuroimaging?

Context: In assessing the patient with headache, clinicians are often faced with 2 important questions: Is this headache a migraine? Does this patient require neuroimaging? The diagnosis of migraine can direct therapy, and information obtained from the history and physical examination is used by physicians to determine which patients require neuroimaging.

Objective: To determine the usefulness of the history and physical examination that distinguish patients with migraine from those with other headache types and that identify those patients who should undergo neuroimaging.

Data Sources And Study Selection: A systematic review was performed using articles from MEDLINE (1966-November 2005) that assessed the performance characteristics of screening questions in diagnosing migraine (with the International Headache Society diagnostic criteria as a gold standard) and addressed the accuracy of the clinical examination in predicting the presence of underlying intracranial pathology (with computed tomography/magnetic resonance imaging as the reference standard).