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

Kathryn A. Phillips, PhD; Harold S. Luft, PhD; James L. Ritchie, MD
University of California, San Francisco

JAMA. 1996;275(8):595.

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

To the Editor.

—The article by Dr Kimmel and colleagues¹ provides important information on the relationship between percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (PTCA) procedure volume and major complications. However, it is important to clarify the comparison the authors made with our study of PTCA patients in California.² Based on an earlier publication of our results that reports only the descriptive unadjusted association between PTCA volumes and outcomes, the authors correctly state that our study did not adjust for demographic and clinical factors. However, a later article, published in May 1995,³ provides multivariate-adjusted results along with detailed analyses. The hospital discharge data used in our study did not include the range of clinical variables available to Kimmel and colleagues. Nonetheless, our findings³ are quite similar to those of Kimmel and colleagues, although some differences do persist.

We found, as did Kimmel and colleagues, that adverse outcomes (coronary artery . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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