Angina prognosis worse in males

Primary care patients with a recent diagnosis of angina who are male, smokers, or obese have worse short-term outcomes, a study finds. Within five years of being diagnosed with angina, men were twice as likely as women to have an acute MI and almost three times as likely to die from cardiac causes, the study of almost 2,000 primary care patients found. Smoking and obesity were also linked with a doubled risk of death, and increasing age was associated with a greater risk of MI or death. Importantly, acute myocardial infarction after a diagnosis of angina was strongly predictive of mortality, the study found. Patients who had an acute MI after diagnosis of angina had an almost nine times greater risk of death from ischaemic heart disease and over four times greater risk of death from all causes. "These results suggest that appropriate control of risk factors and optimal use of preventive medical treatments should be aggressively pursued in patients with angina," the authors wrote in their paper published in the BMJ....