JOURNAL CLUB: Acute Abdominal Pain in Elderly Patients: Effect of Radiologist Awareness of Clinicobiologic Information on CT Accuracy

OBJECTIVE. The purpose of this study was to assess whether the availability of clinicobiologic findings would affect the diagnostic performance of CT of elderly emergency department patients with nontraumatic acute abdominal pain. MATERIALS AND METHODS. The cases of 333 consecutively registered patients 75 years old or older presenting to the emergency department with acute abdominal pain and who underwent CT were retrospectively reviewed by two radiologists blinded or not to the patient's clinicobiologic results. Diagnostic accuracy was calculated according to the level of correctly classified cases in both the entire cohort and a surgical subgroup and was compared between readings performed with and without knowledge of the clinicobiologic findings. Agreement between each reading and the reference diagnosis and interobserver agreement were assessed with kappa statistics. RESULTS. In both the entire cohort (87.4% vs 85.3%, p = 0.07) and the surgical group (94% vs 91%, p = 0.15), there was no significant ...