Striving for Socioeconomic Equity in Ischemic Stroke Care: Imaging and Acute Treatment Utilization From a Comprehensive Stroke Center

Lost to Follow-Up: A Nationwide Analysis of Patients With Transient Ischemic Attack Discharged From Emergency Departments With Incomplete Imaging

“…The underlying causes of delayed and incomplete TIA imaging workup after ED discharge are unclear and could include a multitude of factors, including limited access to ED and/or outpatient imaging resources, lack of provider familiarity with imaging guidelines, patients' lacking primary care physicians to assist in coordination of care, suboptimal communication of discharge instructions, and/or patient nonadherence to discharge instructions [12][13][14][15][16][17][18][19][20]. Some providers could also be discharging patients under a false sense of security after negative results on a single head CT examination, which is the most common ED neuroimaging workup in TIA and also one of the least diagnostically useful because of the limited sensitivity of CT for the detection of infarct, while omitting brain and cervical vessel imaging needed to detect vascular pathology that may have prompted the TIA episode [10,12,21].…”