Heart : official journal of the British Cardiac Society
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Pharmacists are not yet fully integrated into the primary health care team and their skills could be better used to help patients with their long term medicines. The government is encouraging the setting up of medicines management services. ⋯ They are also involved in smoking cessation services. Practice based pharmacists can improve patient care through medication review clinics.
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Various risk stratification systems have been developed in coronary artery bypass graft surgery (CABG), based mainly on patients undergoing procedures with cardiopulmonary bypass. ⋯ The UK CABG Bayes model is reasonably well calibrated and provides good discrimination when applied to OPCAB patients in the UK. Among the other three systems, the ACC/AHA system is well calibrated but its discrimination power was less than for the UK CABG Bayes model. These data suggest that the UK CABG Bayes model could be an appropriate risk stratification system to use for patients undergoing OPCAB in the UK.
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To assess the diagnostic efficiency of the third generation cardiac troponin T assay in routine clinical practice. ⋯ CK-MB is unsuitable as a diagnostic gold standard even at the proposed lower threshold. A lower cut off for cardiac troponin T of 0.05 microg/l should be used for diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction. Diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction cannot be made solely on the basis of a cardiac troponin T result.