Conclusion to Masters Case #02

This is the conclusion to Masters Case #02: 60 Year Old Female – Chest Pain, Hx of Pericarditis. If you haven’t already done so, check out the original post there.   Your patient was a 60yo F who experienced significant 8/10 chest pain that was now down to a 1 or 2 and presented with this EKG:   What to do? This is a really though ECG to sort out (hence it being a “Masters Case”) and will be labelled “non-specific” by most folks who see it, even experts. Indeed, that would be my official interpretation without any further investigations or follow-up to confirm my hunches. Still, by using a deliberate and step-wise approach to read the ECG, you can start to suspect what may be going on here and even make the correct diagnosis. While I don’t have a formal method I use to approach electrocardiograms and my way surely isn’t the only way, I’m going to walk you through how I interpreted this case the first time it was presented to me. As with the last Masters Case, this is how I actually read the EKG given only the basic information contained in initial case presentation linked above.   First off, this patient is not actively experiencing a STEMI. People who tell you that they look at EKG’s in a systematic way by looking first at the rate, rhythm, axis, etc… before even glancing at the T-waves are liars. We work in emergency medicine and the #1 thing we care about when running an EKG on someone with chest...
Source: EMS 12-Lead - Category: Cardiology Authors: Tags: Cases Conclusion Masters Cases Bojana Uzelac posterior reperfusion waves STEMI Vince DiGiulio Source Type: research