Fainting - Evaluation And Treatment
Evaluation and treatment
The patient's history is the most important part of the evaluation, and the physical examination focuses on blood pressure and heart evaluation to exclude the life-threatening causes of fainting. Therapy should be directed toward minimizing multiple risks of fainting, avoiding toxic interventions, and treating specific symptomatic diseases (for example, with pacemakers for certain conduction diseases in the heart), while basing treatment on the underlying disease, rather than on age per se.
PÁLMI V. JÓNSSON
See also BALANCE AND MOBILITY; DEMENTIA WITH LEWY BODIES; DIZZINESS; EPILEPSY; HEART DISEASE; MULTIPLE SYSTEMS ATROPHY; PARKINSONISM.
BIBLIOGRAPHY
JÓNSSON, P. V., and LIPSITZ, L. A. "Dizziness and Syncope." In Principles of Geriatric Medicine and Gerontology, 3d ed. Edited by William R. Hazzard, Edwin L. Bierman, John P. Blass, Walter H. Ettinger, Jr., and Jeffrey B. Halter. McGraw-Hill Inc., 1994. Pages 1165–1181.
LINZER, M.; YANG, E. H.; ESTES, N. A., III; WANG, P.; VORPERIAN, V. R.; and KAPOOR, W. N. "Diagnosing Syncope. Part 2: Unexplained Syncope. Clinical Efficacy Assessment Project of the American College of Physicians." Annals of Internal Medicine 127, no. 1 (1997): 76–86.
SHAW, F. E., and KENNY, R. A. "The Overlap between Syncope and Falls in the Elderly." Postgraduate Medical Journal 73, no. 864 (1997): 635–639.
FALLS
See BALANCE AND MOBILITY
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