Prehospital Triage of Patients With Severe Shortness of Breath Using Biomarkers

Breathlessness is a dangerous symptom. Preliminary data from national and regional Danish databases show, that patients with shortness of breath in the ambulance have a very high mortality. Breathlessness can be caused by many different conditions - but heart diseases and lung diseases are dominant. The mortality is especially high in patients with breathlessness caused by heart disease. Distinguishing these different causes of breathlessness is a classical, often difficult, discipline in medicine. Visitation and guidance of treatment in patients with breathlessness in the prehospital setting relies on medical history and physical examination and as a consequence prehospital treatment for breathlessness is often non-specific. The use of heart-failure specific biomarkers may improve prehospital visitation and treatment of patients with breathlessness. We hypothesize, that 1. Supplementing the routine examination by prehospital anesthesiologist with measurement of a biomarker for heart failure increases the proportion of patients with severe shortness of breath caused by heart disease triaged directly to department of cardiology 2. This strategy does not increase the proportion of patients with severe shortness of breath caused by non-heart disease triaged directly to department of cardiology