HealthNews: Erectile Dysfunction
Patients with high NEDV also were more likely to receive steroid treatments in the ED. While ED length of stay did not differ between groups, patients with a higher NEDV were more likely to be admitted to the hospital. Among patients sent home, systemic corticosteroids were more likely to be prescribed to patients with more ED visits.
Among patients admitted from the ED Generic viagra, the median hospital length of stay was 3 days, which did not differ between NEDV groups (p = 0.69). Patients with a higher NEDV were more likely to report a relapse event during the 2 weeks following the index visit (10%, 14%, 16%, and 21%, respectively; p < 0.001). Patients who frequently use the ED also were more likely to report an ongoing exacerbation at 2-week follow-up (17%, 23%, 25%, and 40%, respectively; p < 0.001).
Manual stepwise, multivariate logistic regression modeling was performed to assess factors associated with high ED use (Table 3). The final model includes age, sex, race/ethnicity, education, insurance status, PCP status, history of hospitalization for asthma, history of intubation for asthma, and recent use of inhaled corticosteroids. While age and sex are not significant predictors of high ED use, whites were less likely to be “high-use” patients. Furthermore, when these factors are controlled, patients with Medicaid insurance were 2.8 times more likely to be very frequent visitors to the ED (p < 0.001). In this ED population, PCP status continued to have no relation with frequency of ED use. By contrast, several measures of chronic asthma severity (eg, history of hospitalization, intubation for asthma, and receiving inhaled corticosteroids during the past 4 weeks) all were independent predictors of frequent ED use.
Discussion
To our knowledge, this is the first large, multicenter study that characterizes asthma patients who frequently utilize the ED for their asthma care. The data were drawn from > 3,000 patients in 83 US EDs. Based on the diversity of these sites, and similar results from previous smaller-scale studies,14-15 we believe that our findings can be generalized to other EDs and may help to identify and target adult asthma patients with very frequent use of the ED for their asthma care.