[Prognostic value of early post-infarction angina in elderly patients]

[Articles on elderly in Serbian medical journals]

INTRODUCTION

Population aging is a feature of all countries in the world. According to statistics, the Republic of Serbia is one of the countries with the majority of the elderly. Taking this into account, are articles on the elderly well represented in domestic medical journals?

OBJECTIVE

The aim of the paper was to determine whether there was a sufficient number of articles on the elderly in domestic medical journals.

METHODS

The articles on the elderly were searched using search engines in domestic and foreign medical journals for the last 5 years compared with the number of articles on children in the same publications for the same period.

RESULTS

In the Serbian Citation Index, 11 articles on the topic of the elderly, and 487 on children were registered. In Srpski arhivza celokupno lekarstvo, there was registered only one article on the topic of the elderly, and 30 on children. In Vojnosanitetskipregled, 2 articles on the elderly and 13 on children were registered (p < 0001). For the last five years, in the New England Journal of Medicine, there were 593 articles on the elderly and 759 articles on children; in the JAMA, there were 63 articles on the elderly and 303 articles on children; and in The Lancet, in the last five years, 46 articles on the elderly and 148 articles on children were published.

CONCLUSION

The themes of the elderly were rarely represented in Serbian medical journals.This has reduced the interest of physicians in medical problems of this growing population of patients and further sent them away from making standards in the diagnosis and treatment of the elderly.

Long-term prognosis of patients with early post-infarction angina

BACKGROUND

Most studies have shown that early post-infarction angina (EPA) implies an unfavorable long-term prognosis among patients with acute myocardial infarction (AMI). However, some studies have failed to establish a link between the occurrence of EPA and increased mortality and recurrent infarction rates.

METHODS AND RESULTS

In order to evaluate a long-term prognosis in patients with EPA, we assessed the 5-year prognosis of 80 patients with AMI by the presence or absence of EPA. During the 5-year follow up, the occurrence of death, cardiac death, recurrent infarction, unstable angina, heart failure, revascularization and cardiac events were recorded. A cardiac event was defined as an occurrence of any of the following events: cardiac death, recurrent infarction, unstable angina, heart failure and revascularization. Survival analysis showed no differences between patients with and without EPA in the probability of death (p=NS), cardiac death (p=NS), recurrent myocardial infarction (p=NS) and unstable angina (p=NS). Patients with EPA had a higher probability of developing cardiac events (p=0.0285) and undergoing revascularization procedures (p=0.0188).

CONCLUSIONS

EPA increases the risk of patients developing cardiac events and undergoing revascularization procedures, and thereby implies a poor long-term prognosis for patients with AMI.