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

Carlos A. Reyes-Ortiz, MD
Medical College of Virginia Richmond

JAMA. 1996;276(13):1033-1034.

	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.

—Dr Normand and colleagues¹ studied mortality from MI in elderly patients and found that 67% of the variability in 30-day mortality rates remained unexplained after controlling for admission severity. However, mortality from MI is affected by psychosocial factors, as well as biological risk factors. Including these other factors in research might explain part of the variability in mortality rates.

Studies show that psychosocial factors contribute to postinfarction prognosis. Frasure-Smith et al² found that major depression in patients hospitalized following an MI was an independent risk for mortality at 6 months, and its impact was equivalent to that of left ventricular dysfunction (Killip class) and history of previous MI. In another study, Case et al³ found that living alone was an independent prognostic risk factor after MI when compared with other risk factors, and the rate of cardiac disease in those living alone was high (12.4%) and similar . . . [Full Text PDF of this Article]

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