Welcome to the nineteenth episode of AEM Early Access, a FOAMed podcast collaboration between the Academic Emergency Medicine Journal and Brown Emergency Medicine. Each month, we'll give you digital open access to an recent AEM Article or Article in Press, with an author interview podcast and suggested supportive educational materials for EM learners.

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DISCUSSING (CLICK ON TITLE; FULL TEXT THROUGH OCTOBER 31, 2018):

Development and Validation of a Measure to Assess Patients’ Threat Perceptions in the Emergency Department. Talea Cornelius, Ph.D., M.S.W., Sachin Agarwal, M.D., M.P.H., Othanya Garcia, B.A., William Chaplin, Ph.D., Donald Edmondson, Ph.D., M.P.H., Bernard P. Chang, M.D.

listen now: interview with first author dr Talea cornelius, phd, MSW

ABSTRACT:

Objective

Threat perceptions in the Emergency Department (ED) (e.g., patients’ subjective feelings of helplessness or lack of control) during evaluation for an acute coronary syndrome (ACS) are associated with the development of posttraumatic stress disorder (PTSD), and PTSD has been associated with medication nonadherence, cardiac event recurrence, and mortality. This study reports the development and validation of a 7‐item measure of ED Threat Perceptions in English‐ and Spanish‐speaking patients evaluated for ACS.

Methods

Participants were drawn from an observational cohort study of 1,000 patients evaluated for ACS between 2013‐2016 in a large, New York City hospital. Participants reported on threat perceptions in the ED and during inpatient stay (using 12 items previously identified as predictive of PTSD) and reported on cardiac‐induced PTSD one month post‐discharge. Exploratory and confirmatory factor analyses were used to establish the factor structure and test measurement invariance. Validity and reliability were examined, as was the association of ED Threat Perceptions with cardiac‐induced PTSD.

Results

Factor analyses identified a 7‐item measure of ED Threat Perceptions (e.g., “I feel helpless,” “I am worried that I am going to die”) for both English‐ and Spanish‐speaking patients. ED Threat Perceptions demonstrated convergent validity, correlating with ED stress and ED crowdedness (rs = .29, .14), good internal consistency (α = .82), and stability (r = .61). Threat Perceptions were associated with cardiac‐induced acute stress at inpatient and PTSD symptoms at one month (rs = .43, .39).

Conclusions

This brief tool assessing ED Threat Perceptions has clinical utility for providers to identify patients at risk for developing cardiac‐induced PTSD and is critical to inform research on whether threat may be modified in‐ED to reduce PTSD incidence.