Diagnostic criteria for transient ischemic attacks instead of definition

What is it about?

Here we have developed and tested explicit diagnostic criteria for transient ischemic attacks to sure that emergency room diagnosis of transient ischemic attacks becomes more reliable especially in its distinction from migraine with aura.

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Why is it important?

The diagnosis of transient ischemic attacks is fraught with problems. The inter-observer agreement has repeatedly been shown to be low even in a neurological setting, and the specificity of the diagnosis is modest to low, reflected in a poor separation of transient ischemic attacks and mimics, particularly migraine with aura.As expected, the separation is worst for general physicians and emergency room physicians but, even after consultation by a neurology resident, it is poor. The main reason for these difficulties is probably that there are no explicit diagnostic criteria for TIA to guide the diagnostic process, only a so called definition (or in fact several definitions). For many other neurological diseases e.g. headache diseases and for all psychiatric diseases, definitions have now been replaced by explicit (operational) diagnostic criteria . To fulfill such diagnostic criteria, very specific clinical information that is specified in the criteria must be obtained. In contrast, the definition of TIA contains almost no guidance about necessary clinical questioning, except that symptoms must be of acute onset and fully reversible.

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