TY - JOUR T1 - Highlights from the issue JF - Emergency Medicine Journal JO - Emerg Med J SP - 1 LP - 1 DO - 10.1136/emermed-2014-204482 VL - 32 IS - 1 AU - Mary Dawood Y1 - 2015/01/01 UR - http://emj.bmj.com/content/32/1/1.abstract N2 - As ED clinicians we often pride ourselves on recognising the sickest patients by how they look, this skill is tacit and one that is the result of experience and longevity in emergency care. Our psychiatric colleagues have long accumulated significant research into disturbances in affect recognition in patients with mental illness, so I was intrigued to read in this issue a study by Kline and colleagues from the US which explored the variability of facial expression in patients with serious cardio pulmonary disease in emergency care settings. They found that patients with serious cardio pulmonary disease lacked facial expression variability and surprise affect. They suggest that stimulus evoked facial expressions in ED patients with cardiopulmonary symptoms may be a useful component of gestalt pre-test probability assessment. So, there may be some substance in one of the many satirical remarks made by Oscar Wilde that “A mask tells us more than a face” though I doubt his context was clinical.Accurately measuring weight in children presenting to the ED is essential and particularly crucial in resuscitation situations where interventions and drug dosages are calculated by weight. The APLS formula, 2× (age+4) has been widely used in western ED's, but as obesity in our young people is becoming more … ER -