Key result
Transesophageal echocardiography demonstrated high diagnostic performance for evaluating suspected traumatic aortic injury across 7 studies involving 758 patients.
Why the study?
Does transesophageal echocardiography accurately diagnose traumatic aortic injury in suspected patients?
Meta-Analysis (n=758)
Does transesophageal echocardiography accurately diagnose traumatic aortic injury in suspected patients?
TEE demonstrates high diagnostic performance for traumatic aortic injury and can be supported as a first-line evaluation tool, though evidence is limited by a lack of randomized trials.
Supports TEE as first-line for suspected traumatic aortic injury; leaves open need for randomized confirmation.
BACKGROUND: An overview of the validity of transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) in patients suspected to have traumatic aortic injury (TAI). METHODS: Computerized bibliographic search of trials from 1994 to 2002 evaluating the use of TEE to confirm the diagnosis of TAI. Seven relevant studies out of 204 were identified, involving 758 patients. The accuracy of TEE was analyzed by constructing summary receiver-operating characteristic (sROC) curves and computing areas under the sROC curve. RESULTS: No prospective randomized trial was found. Although accuracy varied greatly, summary ROC curve found that TEE enjoyed a high diagnostic performance. Some study characteristics can affect accuracy. CONCLUSIONS: Our findings seems to indicate that TEE is a valuable tool for diagnosing TAI, and its use as first-line evaluation of such patients can be supported; however, given the lack of randomized trials, no standard of care can be drawn from the present overview: future studies should look at this problem more carefully, and should be methodologically rigorous.
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Cinnella et al. (2004) conducted a meta-analysis in Traumatic aortic injury (n=758). Transesophageal echocardiography (TEE) was evaluated on Diagnostic accuracy of TEE (summary receiver-operating characteristic curves). Transesophageal echocardiography demonstrated high diagnostic performance for evaluating suspected traumatic aortic injury across 7 studies involving 758 patients.
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