One for the geeks; interval likelihood ratios

The Resus Room

Simon Laing

Science, Emergencymedicine, Medicine, Health & Fitness, Em, Ae

4.8 • 678 Ratings

🗓️ 11 October 2016

⏱️ 15 minutes

🔗️ Recording | iTunes | RSS

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Summary

Risk assessment, testing and risk management form the very heart of Emergency Medicine and Critical Care.

Being aware of the evidence surrounding a topic is key to delivering high level care but without an understanding of the underpinning concepts it's application is extremely limited.

Understanding how a test result changes a patient's likelihood of a disease can be described with likelihood ratios, the Royal College of Emergency Medicine has a podcast explaining likelihood ratios in more detail.

But when a test result comes back on the boundary between positive and negative, or at the extremes of positive we can find it difficult to know what this means and that's where interval likelihood ratios comes into play.

Examples include a minimally elevated WCC in a suspected appendicitis, or a dramatically raised d-dimer as compared to a borderline positive result in a suspected pulmonary embolus, this podcast talks through some of those concepts and their application, enjoy!

References

Evidence-based emergency medicine/skills for evidence-based emergency care. Interval likelihood ratios: another advantage for the evidence-based diagnostician. Brown MD. Ann Emerg Med. 2003

Pulmonary embolism: making sense of the diagnostic evaluation. Wolfe TR. Ann Emerg Med. 2001

Diagnostic accuracy of conventional or age adjusted D-dimer cut-off values in older patients with suspected venous thromboembolism: systematic review and meta-analysis. Schouten HJ. BMJ. 2013

Transcript

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0:00.0	Welcome to the Recess Room podcast.
0:03.9	Five, four, three, two, one, fire.
0:13.5	Hi, and welcome back to the Recess Room podcast. I'm Simon Lang.
0:18.1	And I'm Rob Fenwick.
0:19.4	And this is not our standard sort of podcast
0:22.1	this is just an absolute geek fest on diagnostics and likelihood ratios
0:29.3	oh my goodness you have literally dragged me into your world of geekdom
0:33.9	I'm not really a geek and there are well I probably I probably am a geek, but there are a lot of
0:40.5	people that know a lot more about this than I do, but I just find it a really, really interesting
0:45.6	topic. So we've probably lost about 99% of anyone who's going to be listening by now.
0:52.3	But yeah, this is a really important podcast actually because it, diagnostics, decision
0:57.7	making, not just important for emergency medicine, they're important for all areas of medicine.
1:03.2	And actually, there's a lot of important concepts that we're going to run over.
1:06.9	So I can't wait.
1:08.6	I am also very excited.
1:12.6	Okay, so if likelihood ratios are a bit of a mystery,
1:16.6	and you don't know what we're talking about,
1:18.1	it would be worthwhile going to have a look at the Arkem podcast that exists
1:22.0	that we put a link to on the website,
1:23.8	which talks through diagnostics and likelihood ratios.
1:27.3	So if you go and do that, whilst we make a cup of tea.
1:36.5	And now you're back.
	...

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