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Rebecca Voelker

JAMA. 1999;282:1322.

	Since this article does not have an abstract, we have provided the first 150 words of the full text and any section headings.

Patients with heart disease in Latin America appear to receive less aggressive treatment and face mortality rates nearly twice as high as their neighbors to the north.

During the recent European Society of Cardiology meeting in Barcelona, Spain, researchers from several centers in the United States and Latin America presented findings on 585 patients treated at 72 hospitals in eight Latin American countries and 4358 patients treated at 307 hospitals in the United States and Canada. The patients were in the PURSUIT (Platelet Glycoprotein Iib/IIIa in Unstable Angina: Receptor Suppression Using Integrilin Therapy) clinical trial.

The study showed that in Latin America, 46% of patients underwent diagnostic angiography, 18% received angioplasty, and 11% had cardiac bypass surgery. In North American patients, rates for those procedures were, respectively, 79%, 34%, and 20%. Within 30 days of being hospitalized, 6.8% of patients in Latin America died compared with 3.6% in . . . [Full Text of this Article]