[Characterization of patients with syncope in the emergency department-secondary diagnoses and laboratory parameters of inpatients versus outpatients].

Abstract

Over 1391 patients presented to the emergency department (ED) of a German university hospital with primary diagnosis of syncope from 2019-2022. This monocentric, retrospective study aims to characterize this cohort regarding secondary diagnoses and blood laboratory parameters. Principal focus lay on the differentiation between inpatients (n = 190; 13.7%) and outpatients (n = 1201; 86.3%). Most common secondary diagnoses comprised head injury (n = 188; 13.5%), infection (n = 126; 9.1%), body injury (n = 124; 8.9%), neurological disease (n = 85; 6.1%), arrhythmogenic heart failure (n = 76; 5.5%), cardiovascular risk factors (n = 75; 5.4%), metabolic/nephrological disease (n = 69; 5.0%), and structural heart disease (n = 68; 4.9%). Surgical interventions were performed using catheter (n = 16; 1.2%), percutaneous coronary interventions (n = 15; 1.1%), and pacemaker/defibrillator/event recorders (n = 12; 0.9%). Inpatients had significantly more secondary diagnoses (3.5 vs. 0.3) and higher incidences of abnormal laboratory parameters compared to outpatients. Secondary diagnoses more common in inpatients included cardiovascular risk factors (37.9 vs. 0.2%), arrhythmogenic heart failure (35.3 vs. 0.7%), infection (57.9 vs. 1.3%), and lung disease (6.3 vs. 0.2%). Abnormal blood laboratory values more frequent in inpatients included elevated levels of highly sensitive (hs) troponin T (58.8 vs. 25.7%), creatinine (36.2 vs. 14.8%), leukocytes (43.4 vs. 36.3%), besides decreased hemoglobin (33.3 vs. 16.0%), potassium (5.3 vs. 1.2%), and sodium (2.1 vs. 0.6%).