RESUMO
PURPOSE: Dehydration is a paediatric medical emergency but there is no single standard parameter to evaluate it at the emergency department. Our aim was to evaluate the reliability and validity of capillary refilling time as a triage parameter to assess dehydration in children. METHODS: This was a prospective pilot cohort study of children who presented to two paediatric emergency departments in Italy, with symptoms of dehydration. Reliability was assessed by comparing the triage nurse's measurements with those obtained by the physician. Validity was demonstrated by using 6 parameters suggestive of dehydration. Comparison between refilling time (RT) and a validated Clinical Dehydration Score (CDS) was also considered. The scale's discriminative ability was evaluated for the outcome of starting intravenous rehydration therapy by using a receiver operating characteristic (ROC) curve. RESULTS: Participants were 242 children. All nurses found easy to elicit the RT after being trained. Interobserver reliability was fair, with a Cohen's kappa of 0.56 (95% confidence interval [CI], 0.41 to 0.70). There was a significant correlation between RT and weight loss percentage (r-squared=-0.27; 95% CI, -0.47 to -0.04). The scale's discriminative ability yielded an area under the ROC curve (AUC) of 0.65 (95% CI, 0.57 to 0.73). We found a similarity between RT AUC and CDS-scale AUC matching the two ROC curves. CONCLUSION: The study showed that RT represents a fast and handy tool to recognize dehydrated children who need a prompt rehydration and may be introduced in the triage line-up.
RESUMO
A retrospective survey was undertaken on the health effects of the 1980 earthquake in southern Italy. The study population included 3619 people living in 7 villages situated near the epicentre of the disaster. The overall casulaty rate (dead and injured) was 19.7
. Nearly all the deaths (192/202) occurred among trapped people who died before they could be rescued. Eighty per cent of all the trapped people were estricated within 2 days, mostly without the use of sophisticated means. The probability of survival decreased sharply, the longer the time before extrication. The crude mortality during the 18 months following the earthquake was 19.0 per thousand among the injured people who received treatment , and 14.1 per thousand among non-injured people. After age standardization, there was no significant difference between these two figures and the expected mortality figures for the Italian population in normal times (14.4 per thousand). These results stress the importance of providing rescue activities in the first 48 hours after the impact. Strengthening the selfreliance of the community in disaster preparedness is suggested as the best way to improve the effectiveness of relief operations. In disaster-prone areas, training and education in methods of rescue should be an integral part of any primary health care programme(AU)