Background: Assessment of patients with chest pain is a regular challenge in the emergency department (ED). Recent guidelines recommended quantitative assessment of ischemic risk by means of risk scores.
Objective: Our aim was to assess the performance of Thrombosis in Myocardial Infarction (TIMI); Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE); history, electrocardiogram, age, risk factors, and troponin (HEART) scores; and the North America Chest Pain Rule (NACPR) without components of clinical gestalt in predicting 30-day major adverse cardiac events (MACE).
Methods: We performed a prospective cohort study in adult patients who attended the ED with undifferentiated chest pain. Clinical prediction rules were applied and calculated. The clinical prediction rules were modified from the original ones, excluding components requiring judgment by clinical gestalt. The primary outcome was MACE. Performance of the tests were evaluated by receive operating characteristic curves and the area under curves (AUC).
Results: There were 1081 patients included in the study. Thirty-day MACE occurred in 164 (15.2%) patients. The AUC of the GRACE score was 0.756, which was inferior to the TIMI score (AUC 0.809) and the HEART score (AUC 0.845). A TIMI score ≥ 1 had a sensitivity of 97% and a specificity of 45.7%. A GRACE score ≥ 50 had a sensitivity of 99.4% and a specificity of 7.5%. A HEART score ≥ 1 had a sensitivity of 98.8% and a specificity of 11.7%. The NACPR had a sensitivity of 93.3% and a specificity of 51.5%.
Conclusions: Without clinical gestalt, the modified HEART score had the best discriminative capacity in predicting 30-day MACE.
Keywords: acute coronary syndrome; chest pain; decision support techniques; myocardial infarction.
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