SynthesisAcademic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine2026
Serious outcomes among emergency department patients with presyncope: A systematic review.
Synthesis in Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine, 2026. The graph could read no effect estimate from its abstract, so it casts no vote on the map. Cited by 3 papers, 1 of them a synthesis that pooled it.
What it found
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The abstract states no effect estimate the extractor could read, or names no intervention and outcome on the map, so this paper lights no cell and moves no belief. It is still indexed, cited and linked below.
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Who cites it
3 citing papers in PubMed, 1 synthesis or guideline pooled it.
- Serious outcomes among emergency department patients with presyncope: A systematic review.Academic emergency medicine : official journal of the Society for Academic Emergency Medicine · 2026Pooled it
- Validation of 2 Syncope Risk Scores and Comparison With Physician Risk Estimation.JAMA network open · 2026Observational
- Serious Cardiac Outcomes and Physician Estimation of Risk in Emergency Department Patients With Presyncope Versus Syncope.Annals of emergency medicine · 2026Observational
Corrections and comments
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Authors and funding
5 authors.
Funding
No grant is acknowledged in the PubMed record.
Abstract
backgroundSyncope is transient loss of consciousness, and in presyncope, patients experience same prodromal symptoms without losing consciousness. While studies have extensively reported the risk of serious outcome among emergency department (ED) syncope, the outcome for patients with presyncope and their management are not well studied. We undertook a systematic review to assess the occurrence/identification of short-term (30-day) serious outcomes among ED patients with presyncope.
methodsED studies that enrolled patients with presyncope and reported any short-term serious outcome were included. Studies that enrolled patients without presyncope (e.g., hypoglycemia, seizure, and stroke) were excluded. We restricted our study to only English publications and searched the MEDLINE, Embase, Scopus, and Web of Science from the inception date to July 2023. We used SIGN 50 tool for assessment of risk of bias.
resultsIn total, 1788 articles were screened by two reviewers and 32 articles were selected for full-text assessment. Five (four prospective and one retrospective) studies with 2741 presyncope patients were included. Four studies were from North America and the fifth one was from Europe. Included studies had weaknesses due to risk of bias, but all had acceptable quality. The prevalence of overall adverse outcome varied 4.4%-26.8% for all adults and 5.5%-18.7% among older patients; arrhythmia was the most prevalent (17.4% in one study), followed by anemia/hemorrhage as reported in different studies. Among older patients, myocardial infarction was the third most common serious outcome reported in one study.
conclusionsThe prevalence of short-term serious outcomes varies from 4% to 27% among ED patients with presyncope in our review, with arrhythmia being the most common serious outcome. Our review indicates that presyncope may carry a similar risk to syncope, and hence, the same level of caution should be exercised for ED presyncope management as syncope.
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