We thank Gerhard Bauer and Brian Fury of the University of California at Davis Good Manufacturing Practice Laboratory for manufacturing of the investigational drug products; Jessica Munson of ARL Bio Pharma for testing the quality and stability of the investigational drugs; Henry Wang and Edward Jauch for serving as independent medical safety monitors; the members of the data and safety monitoring board (Barbara Dworetzky [chair], Gail Anderson, Jeffrey Buchhalter, Elizabeth Sugar, Alexis Topjian, and Peter Gilbert [NINDS liaison]); and especially all our patients and the emergency department nurses, pharmacists, and physicians who made the trial possible.

No abstract

Objectives: The authors sought to describe the epidemiology of and risk factors for recurrent and highfrequency use of the emergency department (ED) by children.Methods: This was a retrospective cohort study using a database of children aged 0 to 17 years, inclusive, presenting to 22 EDs of the Pediatric Emergency Care Applied Research Network (PECARN) during 2007, with 12-month follow-up after each index visit. ED diagnoses for each visit were categorized as trauma, acute medical, or chronic medical conditions. Recurrent visits were defined as any repeat visit; high-frequency use was defined as four or more recurrent visits. Generalized estimating equations (GEEs) were used to measure the strength of associations between patient and visit characteristics and recurrent ED use.Results: A total of 695,188 unique children had at least one ED visit each in 2007, with 455,588 recurrent ED visits in the 12 months following the index visits. Sixty-four percent of patients had no recurrent visits, 20% had one, 8% had two, 4% had three, and 4% had four or more recurrent visits. Acute medical diagnoses accounted for most visits regardless of the number of recurrent visits. As the number of recurrent visits per patient rose, chronic diseases were increasingly represented, with asthma being the most common ED diagnosis. Trauma-related diagnoses were more common among patients without recurrent visits than among those with high-frequency recurrent visits (28% vs. 9%; p < 0.001). Highfrequency recurrent visits were more often within the highest severity score classifications. In multivariable analysis, recurrent visits were associated with younger age, black or Hispanic race or ethnicity, and public health insurance. Conclusions:Risk factors for recurrent ED use by children include age, race and ethnicity, and insurance status. Although asthma plays an important role in recurrent ED use, acute illnesses account for the majority of recurrent ED visits.ACADEMIC EMERGENCY MEDICINE 2014;21:365-373

clinicaltrials.gov Identifier: NCT00621478.