Hyponatremia in the emergency department: an overview of diagnostic and therapeutic approach.

Introduction: Hyponatremia, defined as a serum sodium concentration <135 mmol/l, is a frequent electrolyte disorder in patients presenting to an emergency department (ED). In this context, appropriate diagnostic and therapeutic management is rarely performed and challenging due to complex pathophysiologic mechanisms and a variety of underlying diseases.

Objective: To implement a feasible pathway of central diagnostic and therapeutic steps in the setting of an ED.

[The abdominal pain unit as a treatment pathway : Structured care of patients with atraumatic abdominal pain in the emergency department].

Background: Patients with atraumatic abdominal pain are common in the emergency department and have a relatively high hospital mortality, with a very wide spectrum of different causes. Rapid, goal-directed diagnosis is essential in this context.

Methods: In a Delphi process with representatives of different disciplines, a diagnostic treatment pathway was designed, which is called the Abdominal Pain Unit (APU).

Point-of-care lung ultrasound in COVID-19 patients: inter- and intra-observer agreement in a prospective observational study.

With an urgent need for bedside imaging of coronavirus disease 2019 (COVID-19), this study's main goal was to assess inter- and intraobserver agreement in lung ultrasound (LUS) of COVID-19 patients. In this single-center study we prospectively acquired and evaluated 100 recorded ten-second cine-loops in confirmed COVID-19 intensive care unit (ICU) patients. All loops were rated by ten observers with different subspeciality backgrounds for four times by each observer (400 loops overall) in a random sequence using a web-based rating tool.

SARS-CoV-2 antigen rapid immunoassay for diagnosis of COVID-19 in the emergency department.

Background: In the emergency department (ED) setting, rapid testing for SARS-CoV-2 is likely associated with advantages to patients and healthcare workers, for example, enabling early but rationale use of limited isolation resources. Most recently, several SARS-CoV-2 rapid point-of-care antigen tests (AGTEST) became available. There is a growing need for data regarding their clinical utility and performance in the diagnosis of SARS-CoV-2 infection in the real life setting EDs.