Thousands of patients are left disabled as a result of misdiagnosis.
Nearly 6% of patients who go to the emergency room wind up being misdiagnosed, according to a report published Thursday.
The review by the U.S. Department of Health and Human Services Agency for Healthcare Research and Quality looked at hundreds of studies dating between January 2000 and September 2021. It found that though error rates are low, the sheer number of patients passing through A&E every year means that millions are still affected.
Out of the 7.4 million misdiagnosis errors made annually, 2.6 million result in harm that could have been prevented, and 370,000 result in the patient becoming permanently disabled or dying.
Women and people of color were more likely to be misdiagnosed, sometimes by 20-30%. Age was a key factor when it came to certain conditions being misdiagnosed — e.g., younger patients who had strokes were more than six times as likely to be diagnosed with something else, while appendicitis was more commonly missed in older people.
The ten conditions most commonly misdiagnosed were:
1) stroke
(2) myocardial infarction (aka, a heart attack)
(3) aortic aneurysm and dissection (a tear in the body’s main artery, the aorta)
(4) spinal cord compression and injury
(5) venous thromboembolism (a condition that comes about when a blood clot forms in a vein)
(6/7 – tie) meningitis and encephalitis
(6/7 – tie) sepsis
(8) lung cancer
(9) traumatic brain injury and traumatic intracranial hemorrhage
(10) arterial thromboembolism (a blood clot that develops in an artery)
Most of the errors that occurred were attributed to “inadequate knowledge, skills, or reasoning,” particularly when it came to unusual or subtle presentations of a condition.
Though the study notes that not all misdiagnoses are necessarily preventable, the huge discrepancy in the rate of misdiagnoses across different hospitals — and the knowledge shortfall that appears to be to blame in most cases — suggests that improvement is possible in many facilities. The error rates also mirror those seen in inpatient settings.
