Outcomes of Emergency Department Patients with Presyncope

Presyncope is the sense of an impending loss of consciousness. Its clinical importance in the emergency department (ED) setting has not been studied extensively. Now, investigators in two Canadian EDs conducted a prospective cohort study to determine outcomes among presyncope patients and to determine physicians' ability to predict serious adverse events at 30 days.

Of 780 patients with outcome data, 5.1% experienced a serious adverse event, including death (0.3%), cardiovascular events (3.1%), and noncardiac events (1.8%). Of 740 patients discharged to home, 1.9% experienced serious outcomes after discharge. Physicians' ability to predict serious adverse events was very poor (area under the receiving operator characteristic curve, 0.58).