Thursday, January 9, 2014

Welcome Welcome!!

I always say I'm going to keep a blog and I never do but I think this time I'll try my best to make it happen because it will help me study along the way-hopefully...

Anyways, I'm currently a clinical medical student from American University of the Caribbean. I've already completed a Family Medicine elective and today was orientation for my IM rotation.

The attending at the hospital seems really great and eager to teach which is always a plus. We didn't get to meet any of the residents today but from the atmosphere, I think it's safe to say they'll all be really wonderful people to work with. I can at least say the group of students I'm with are very friendly and helpful so I think this rotation should be a lot of fun!

Now-how can this blog help me study? And help you learn? I've decided for each post I'm going to have a topic of the day-something that either my attending assigned us to look up or something that I've been studying on my own and thought would be interesting for you to know.

So...what's today's Topic of the Day? CURB-65!!!!

This was something my attending asked us all to look up and it's actually really important to know, especially if you're in the hospital.

CURB-65 is an acronym physicians use to measure the severity of disease in a pneumonia patient. This helps to determine whether or not the patient can be treated outpatient or if they have to stay in the hospital or even if they need to be admitted to the ICU.

Confusion
Urea > 20 mg/dL (7 mmol/L)
Respiratory rate > 30 breaths/minute
Blood pressure systolic < 90 or diastolic < 60
65 yo or greater

Each criteria is worth 1 point. So if the patient meets all 5 criteria, they will have scored 5 points.

Ok, so now how does all of this translate into whether or not the patient should be admitted?

0-1 points: outpatient therapy is appropriate (low severity-risk of death < 3%)
2 points: consider hospitalization (moderate severity-risk of death 9%)
3-5 points: must be hospitalized & consider ICU esp if score is 4 or 5 (high severity-risk of death 15-40%)

There's also another measurement physicians use, called the Pneumonia Severity Index but studies have shown that there is not a statistically significant difference between the interpretation of pneumonia patients measured using CURB-65 vs PSI.

Welp, that's all I've got for today-tomorrow will be my first day on the wards so I'll be back with some juicy stories from the hospital as well as another Topic of the Day! I hope you'll be back as well :)