Performance of an Index Predicting the Response of Patients with Acute Bronchial Asthma to Intensive Emergency Department Treatment

IT is estimated that acute bronchial asthma accounts for 134,000 hospital admissions and 27 million physician visits annually in the United States.1 Physicians practicing in emergency departments have great difficulty in predicting whether a given patient should be admitted or whether he or she can be treated and discharged from the emergency department, without early relapse.Investigators have tried to identify the signs or symptoms that predict the outcomes of patients with acute asthma.2 3 4 5 6 7 8 9 10 11 No single clinical or laboratory finding has been found to predict outcomes reliably.12 , 13 Thus, multifactorial-assessment procedures have been explored. A recently described predictor index14 appeared especially . . .