Natural history of coronary heart disease and heart disease of uncertain etiology: Findings from a 50-year population study

Lifetime prediction of coronary heart disease and heart disease of uncertain etiology in a 50-year follow-up population study

“…Mean age at first event was largely and significantly greater for HDUE (74.3 ± 9.9 years) than for CHD (68.9 ± 11.2 years) (p b 0.0001) [15].…”

“…Due to reasons documented elsewhere [15] and quoted in the result section, the presence of AP was used for validating CHD cases and reclassifying part of HDUE cases. Therefore, other models were computed including also the presence of accompanying AP and then after having re-classified part of the HDUE cases.…”

Lifestyle behaviour and lifetime incidence of heart diseases

“…Incidence of common heart diseases was measured exploiting all possible information collected at baseline, at periodical re-examinations, at special search at hospitals, clinics and general practitioners, interviews with relatives and data from causes of death as described elsewhere [21,22]. Diagnoses were based on history, physical examination, ECG tracings, causes of death and occasionally reported diagnoses.…”

“…Mortality data were complete for the duration of 50 years and causes of death were coded, following defined criteria, using the WHO-ICD-8 [28]. Heart diseases were classified into two large groups following analyses presented elsewhere [21], as follows: a) CHD were manifested as sudden death (when other causes could be reasonably excluded), fatal and non-fatal myocardial infarction, and other fatal and non-fatal acute ischemic syndromes; b) HDUE were manifested only as heart failure, severe chronic arrhythmia (such as atrial fibrillation), heart blocks, documented diagnoses of hypertensive heart disease or "chronic CHD". Subjects with these latter manifestations who in addition had angina pectoris were classified as CHD due to reasons documented and explained elsewhere [21,22].…”

“…Observations of this type are sometimes defined as lifetime estimates although studies with complete extinction of the original cohorts are rare [19]. The Italian Rural Areas (IRA) of the Seven Countries of Cardiovascular Diseases have reached 50 years of follow-up and some reports on that duration have been already published [18,[20][21][22].…”