This Article  • Full text  • PDF  • Send to a friend  • Save in My Folder  • Save to citation manager  • Permissions  Citing Articles  • Citing articles on HighWire  • Contact me when this article is cited  Related Content  • Similar articles in JAMA  Social Bookmarking   What's this?

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

To the Editor: Dr Tu and colleagues¹ reported that mortality following acute myocardial infarction (AMI) was related to the volume of similar patients treated by the physician. Their recommendation that "shifting the care of more AMI patients to a smaller number of high volume physicians could potentially result in a significant decrease in the number of AMI deaths that occur each year," is not justified. Patients with physicians who saw over 24 cases a year had lower 30-day and 1-year mortality but this may reflect favorable selection bias. Physicians who cared for only 1 to 5 cases of AMI per year had higher mortality but their patients also had higher comorbidity (increased age, acute and chronic renal failure, diabetes, stroke, cancer, and congestive heart failure). Unfortunately, selection bias is not adequately handled by multivariate regression analyses.

In addition, no data were provided on other important variables, such as time of . . . [Full Text of this Article]

CiteULike    Connotea    Del.icio.us    Digg    Reddit    Technorati    Twitter     What's this?

THIS ARTICLE HAS BEEN CITED BY OTHER ARTICLES

Getting a better grip on research: the comfort of opinion
Maskrey et al.
InnovAiT 2009;2:679-686.
ABSTRACT | FULL TEXT