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Management of Acute Chest Pain in Older Patients

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Geriatric Emergency Medicine

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Abstract

Chest pain is the most frequent leading symptom in the emergency department and challenges the team, because it has many differential diagnoses. Furthermore, a significant proportion of patients presenting in the emergency department with chest pain are older patients accounting for further challenges in finding the right diagnosis: older patients often present with atypical symptoms, suffer from multimorbidity, some have limitations of memory and need polypharmacy. After finding a suspected diagnosis, the initiation of the best therapy needs to take into account the general health, comorbidities, cognitive status, and life expectancy, as well as age-related altered pharmacokinetics and possible adverse effects of these therapies.

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Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Division of Emergency and Acute Medicine, Campus Virchow-Klinikum and Campus Mitte; Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Tim Arnold & Martin Möckel

  2. Department of Geriatric Medicine, Campus Benjamin Franklin, Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Ursula Müller-Werdan

  3. Department of Cardiology, Campus Virchow-Klinikum and Campus Mitte; Charité – Universitätsmedizin Berlin, Berlin, Germany

    Martin Möckel

Authors
  1. Tim Arnold
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  2. Ursula Müller-Werdan
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  3. Martin Möckel
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Corresponding author

Correspondence to Martin Möckel .

Editor information

Editors and Affiliations

  1. Emergency Department, University Hospital Basel, Basel, Switzerland

    Christian Nickel

  2. Department of Emergency Medicine, Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center, Harvard Medical School, Boston, MA, USA

    Abdelouahab Bellou

  3. Department of Health Sciences, University of Leicester, Leicester, UK

    Simon Conroy

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Arnold, T., Müller-Werdan, U., Möckel, M. (2018). Management of Acute Chest Pain in Older Patients. In: Nickel, C., Bellou, A., Conroy, S. (eds) Geriatric Emergency Medicine. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19318-2_17

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-19318-2_17

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  • Publisher Name: Springer, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-19317-5

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-19318-2

  • eBook Packages: MedicineMedicine (R0)

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