Heart : official journal of the British Cardiac Society
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Multicenter Study
Racial variation in cardiovascular morbidity and mortality in essential hypertension.
To perform a longitudinal comparison of morbidity and mortality among white, south Asian and Afro-Caribbean hypertensive patients in relation to baseline demographic characteristics and clinic and ambulatory blood pressure variables. ⋯ South Asian origin was an independent predictor of all cause events, mainly because of an excess of coronary events in this group. Ambulatory but not clinic blood pressure was of additional value in predicting subsequent morbidity and mortality.
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To explore the current use of secondary preventive treatment in survivors of out of hospital cardiac arrest without myocardial infarction (primary ventricular tachycardia/ventricular fibrillation (VT/VF)) in West Yorkshire, and assess the implications of recent studies on the benefits of implantable cardioverter-defibrillators (AICD) in this context. ⋯ Mortality among survivors of non-infarct related prehospital cardiac arrest remains significant, with few patients being referred for specialist investigation. The implementation of recent guidelines on AICD use in cardiac arrest survivors would have resulted in an approximate 60% increase in the total numbers of defibrillators implanted in the West Yorkshire area.
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To investigate whether uncomplicated chronic coronary artery disease causes changes in heart rate variability and if so, whether the heart rate variability pattern is different from that described in patients with acute myocardial infarction. ⋯ Uncomplicated coronary artery disease without previous acute myocardial infarction was associated with reduced high and low frequency heart rate variability, including vagal tone. SDANN and SDNN, expressing ultra low and very low frequencies which are known to reflect prognosis after acute myocardial infarction, were less affected. This is in agreement with the good prognosis in uncomplicated angina in this study.