When Peripheral Vertigo Isn’t

But, such misdiagnosis is rather rare.

These authors conduct a retrospective, administrative database study of patients discharged from an Ontario, Canada, Emergency Department between 2006 and 2011 with a diagnosis of peripheral vertigo.  They identify 41,794 patients with appropriate data and an explicit diagnosis of peripheral vertigo, and follow them for adverse outcomes.  Most importantly for this paper, looking at subsequent stroke diagnoses, they find 57 (0.14%) received a diagnosis of stroke within 7 days.  To these authors, this number represents a miss rate for actual cerebrovascular causes of vertigo on initial presentation.

It’s a little hard to put great confidence in this precise number, however, because there were actually 270,865 visits discharged with diagnoses of dizziness & vertigo.  The largest cohort of these, 71% of them, were discarded from analysis because their diagnosis was “Dizziness, giddiness, lightheadedness, vertigo NOS”, which was not specific enough for these authors’ purposes.  It would have been enlightening to have included this less-specific cohort in this analysis, at least as a parallel comparison group, for additional insight.

However, the authors do something I quite like in this paper, and something I think would improve the robustness of many other studies:  a propensity-matched analysis attempting to establish a baseline level of risk.  For these authors, they choose renal colic – a generally benign, yet frequent, condition, that ought confer no special additional risk of stroke.  These authors have no difficulty finding 34,872 of patients to pool into a cohort relatively well-matched on important risk factors.  These renal colic patients have very similar rates of falls and fractures in the short-term after discharge – but they have many fewer strokes.  Most of the difference between cohorts arises in the first 7 days, with 50 occurring in the vertigo cohort versus zero in renal colic.  Between day 7 and and 365, however, the rate difference narrows, with 74 strokes in the vertigo cohort and 49 in renal colic.

Despite the massive limitations of retrospective review and relying on diagnosis codes, I think the authors’ general observation is correct.  Dizziness can be a quite challenging diagnosis to evaluate in the Emergency Department, and clearly some patients are being erroneously given diagnoses of peripheral etiologies.  However, the rate of misdiagnosis in this cohort is likely somewhere better than 1 in 700, which I find generally clinically acceptable considering the impossibility of utilizing advanced imaging in such a vast population.

We can certainly endeavor to do better, but we have a lot of work cut out for ourselves in improving the specificity of our clinical evaluation first.

“Outcomes among patients discharged from the emergency department with a diagnosis of peripheral vertigo”