This news story is looking at treatment of atrial fibrillation and its associated risk factors. Now, we’ve covered a-fib here on the show before. You can look back in past episodes and find those episode links and listen to that show or watc h that episode. In any case, a-fib comes associated with some risk factors including increased risk for stroke, pulmonary embolism, cardiac events and heart failure. So, what do we do when we have patients with atrial fibrillation to assess their risk for those events?
Well, there are all kinds of scoring and screening scales out there. We use them to assess patients’ fall risk, we use them to assess patients for many different things and there is an assessment scale for atrial fibrillation called the CHADS 2 score and its used to assess patients and see whether or not they have an increased risk for things like stroke. So if you use this score and you assess your atrial fibrillation patient, it was found in this recent study coming out of Sweden that patients with a higher CHADS 2 score were found to be at increased risk for stroke, other cardiac events and actually, the CHADS 2 score was found to score well for other cardiac issues. So not even patients with atrial fibrillation but patients with any onset of acute coronary syndrome using the CHDS 2 score was predictive of their risk other problems to occur such as stroke and other associated issues.
That’s what this particular news item I found over at medical news today is talking about and you should keep in mind that there are a host of assessment tools available for taking care of our patients and we should utilize those tools, we should also continually assess those tools for their effectiveness in predicting problems with our patients. Just because we’ve used a tool forever in a day doesn’t mean that it can’t be tweaked or made a little bit better to better cause us to look more carefully at our patients and predict future outcomes and try to avoid negative outcomes. So, I like studies like this and I’ll continue to bring those out as I find them.
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This article has been featured in the news segment of the Nursing Show podcast episode Psychological Assessment and Episode 145.
