Saliva Alcohol Reagent Strips in Altered Response Protocols

Abstract

The prehospital care provider has been limited in his or her initial assessment of patients due to having available only a limited number of simple diagnostic tests. There has not been an accurate field test available to rule out significant ethanol intoxication. We designed a prospective trial for the prehospital setting to test the utility of a rapid, semi-quantitative, saliva alcohol reagent strip for patients with an altered level of consciousness. We found that these strips were useful in ruling out significant ethanol intoxication as a cause of an altered level of consciousness with a sensitivity of 85.7% and a specificity of 94.4%, but were not useful in accurately predicting the blood alcohol level. We conclude that these reagent strips are useful in the prehospital setting to provide information about patients with an altered level of consciousness.

EMS Providers Do Not Accurately Note Motor-Vehicle Crash Patients With Positive Serum Alcohol Concentrations

“…One small study has noted that saliva alcohol reagent strips, when used in the emergency medical services setting on patients with an altered level of consciousness, do not accurately predict blood alcohol level. 15 Several limitations of the current study should be noted. The ambulance record used in this study had no specific item regarding alcohol use.…”

An analysis of clinical toxicology urine specimens using the KDI quik test™

“…(1) An accurate qualitative drug screen that would confirm or refute the presence of certain drugs may be useful in the emergency 369 Clinical Toxicology Downloaded from informahealthcare.com by UB Wuerzburg on 11/01/14…”