Accident and Emergency Departments at a Princess Margret Hospital, b Queen Elizabeth

Chinese ethnicity · Transient ischemic attack · Prognosis · Stroke · Carotid stenosis · Lacunar infarct Background: Literature on prognosis of transient ischemic attack (TIA) in Chinese is scarce. The short-term prognosis of TIA and the predictive value of the ABCD 2 score in Hong Kong Chinese patients attending the emergency department (ED) were studied to provide refer-ence for TIA patient management in our ED. Methods: A cohort of TIA patients admitted through the ED to 13 acute public hospitals in 2006 was recruited through the centralized electronic database by the Hong Kong Hospital Authority (HA). All inpatients were e-coded by the HA according to the International Classification of Diseases, Ninth Revision (ICD9). Elec-tronic records and hard copies were studied up to 90 days after a TIA. The stroke risk of a separate TIA cohort diagnosed by the ED was compared. Results: In the 1,000 recruited pa-tients, the stroke risk after a TIA at days 2, 7, 30, and 90 was 0.2, 1.4, 2.9, and 4.4%, respec-tively. Antiplatelet agents were prescribed in 89%, warfarin in 6.9%, statin in 28.6%, antihyper-tensives in 39.3%, and antidiabetics in 11.9 % of patients after hospitalization. Before the inde