Monitoring may need to be prolonged in patients given warfarin and amiodarone: Fig 1
Year: 1996
Type: letter
Abstract: practice, we do not suppose that automated reporting represents an acceptable alternative gold standard.Furthermore, we made a specific distinction between major abnormalities, which are generally easily distinguished,3 and minor abnormalities, which are generally harder to distinguish.We also pointed out that patients with a murmur will require echocardiography because patients with valvar heart disease may have a normal echocardiogram; this may explain part of the difference between Khandekar and colleagues' and our findings (in our service, referrals for assessment of murmurs were not encouraged and few such referrals were received).We accept Simon Sanderson's comments about predictive values and prevalence, although we think that his qualifications strengthen our case.One of our chieffindings was the exceptional negative predictive value of the electrocardiogram (that is, a normal electrocardiogram virtually excludes chronic heart failure secondary to left ventricular systolic dysfunction).This was subsequently confirmed by data from the coronary artery surgery study's registry.4Sanderson's recalculation of our results on the basis of a lower prevalence yields an even more exceptional negative predictive value of 99.9%.We are pleased to see that Gregory Y H lip and colleagues are so far in agreement with our findings that they have extended them to acute heart failure in hospital practice.One of our reasons for publishing our findings in a general medical journal was the fact that, while they may do little more than "confirm a longstanding clinical impression," they do confirm it and provide evidence for it.They are therefore of interest to a wider audience than general practitioners alone.
Source: BMJ
Institutions: Chinese University of Hong Kong, Prince of Wales Hospital
Language: English
Subfield: Cardiology and Cardiovascular Medicine
Field: Medicine
Domain: Health Sciences
Open Access status: green
OpenAlex ID: W2042254412