Interest of CARE Rule to Exclude the Hypothesis of an Acute Coronary Syndrome Without Bioassay - ICARE

Acute coronary syndrome (ACS) is a major health problem and its diagnosis remains a challenge for the emergency physician. The management of a suspected ACS is well codified, based on troponin assays, renewed if necessary. Conversely, the criteria leading to initiate a diagnostic procedure in chest pain to the Emergency department are unclear. The fear is, firstly, to miss a potentially life treating diagnosis and, secondly, exposing many patients to unnecessary examinations. The advent of highly sensitive troponin assays also increases the risk of over-investigation by a larger number of elevations of the biomarker in non-coronary circumstances leading to a prolongation of hospitalization and, possibly, unnecessary treatments and invasive investigations. CARE rule could help to streamline this first step. It is established by assigning a value from 0 to 2 to the items: Characteristic of pain, Age, Risk factors and ECG. The search for an ACS is not justified if the sum of points is ≤1 (negative rule) and, conversely, a troponin should be performed if the sum is \> 1 (positive rule). Indeed, CARE rule corresponds to the first 4 items of the HEART score (the latter standing for troponin at admission) whose reliability has been demonstrated, a ≤3 income excluding ACS with a risk of false negatives \<2%. A negative CARE rule always corresponds to a HEART score ≤3. Our study aims to confirm the interest of CARE rule to streamline the search for an ACS in chest pain as an observational European multicenter prospective study.