Criteria for admitting patients with tricyclic antidepressant overdosage

0 Abstract-Several investigators have recently developed guidelines for determining which patients with tricyclic an-tidepressant overdose should be hospitalized. The width of the QRS complex on the ECG and several clinical parame-ters have been proposed to identify patients at risk for ma-jor complications. To validate these, we developed an algo-rithm and then applied it to 45 patients who had overdosed on tricyclic antidepressants. This algorithm correctly pre-dicted which patients required admission, whether due to present or impending complications, and which patients could have been discharged without morbidity or mortality. We conclude that use of the modified algorithm can identi-fy patients with tricyclic antidepressant overdose who can be safely discharged from the emergency department. 0 Keywords- algorithm; tricyclic; antidepressant; overdose; complication