Chest pressure with dyspnea commonly leads physicians and other health care professionals to consider an acute coronary syndrome such as unstable angina or MI, but these symptoms also may represent chest wall pain or PE. PPIs reduce the amount of stomach acid that your glands secrete, which also allows ulcers and acidic corrosion to heal. Quantitative enzyme-linked immunosorbent antibody assay (ELISA) d-dimer assays are more sensitive and have been more thoroughly tested in clinical settings than whole-blood agglutination assays.32 A low clinical suspicion for PE (e.g., Wells score less than 2) plus a normal quantitative ELISA d-dimer assay safely rules out PE, with a negative predictive value greater than 99.5 percent.20,32,33 If further testing is needed, helical computed tomography (CT), combined with clinical suspicion and other testing such as lower extremity venous ultrasound, can be used to rule in or rule out PE.33,34 A number of different sequential testing protocols have been proposed, all of which involve the same basic elements: (1) for patients with low clinical suspicion and a normal d-dimer, no further evaluation or treatment is needed unless symptoms change or progress; (2) for patients with low clinical suspicion and an abnormal d-dimer, or moderate to high clinical suspicion, helical CT and lower extremity venous ultrasound examination should be ordered; (3) for patients with moderate or high clinical suspicion and an abnormal CT scan or venous ultrasound result, treatment should be given for PE or DVT regardless of D-dimer; and (4) for patients with an abnormal d-dimer plus a normal CT scan and a normal venous ultrasound result, serial ultrasound should be considered if clinical suspicion is low to moderate, and pulmonary angiography should be considered if clinical suspicion is high.33,35 Patients in whom PE initially is ruled out by such an approach and who do not receive treatment have a less than 1 percent risk for PE occurring over the subsequent three months.33 An encounter form that takes this approach appears in the February 1, 2004, issue of American Family Physician and can be accessed online at https://www.aafp.org/afp/2004/0201/p599.html.36, Chest radiograph generally is considered the reference standard for patients suspected of having pneumonia, and it is the standard against which clinical evaluations for pneumonia are compared.10 An abnormal ECG and cardiomegaly on chest radiograph increase the likelihood of heart failure among patients with chest pain,26 and brain natriuretic peptide (also known as B-type natriuretic peptide) level has been found to be reliable for detecting heart failure in patients presenting with acute dyspnea.
substernal vs midsternal chest pain