BMJ  2003;327:1405-1406 (13 December), doi:10.1136/bmj.327.7428.1405-a

Letter

Prognosis for South Asian and white patients with heart failure in the United Kingdom

Counterintuitive findings on heart failure in South Asians may be artefactual

The first 150 words of the full text of this article appear below.

EDITOR—Blackledge et al recognise some of their findings as counterintuitive—for example, a huge excess of hospital admissions for heart failure in South Asians and yet a better outcome.1 Such results could be artefactual.2

They use cases from 1998 to 2001 but the population in 1991. Were the ethnic codes used in hospital data the same as those used in the 1991 census, and were the populations called South Asian the same in the numerator and denominator? Table 1 shows that 85% of South Asian patients lived in the most deprived areas (Q5), compared with 38% of white patients. Figure 1 shows an age adjusted ratio for heart failure admission of about 2.8 in men and 4.3 in women, in apparent contradiction to the figures given in the abstract (3.8 and 5.2). There are typographical errors in table 2.

Survival model for South Asian and white patients in cohort . . . [Full text of this article]

Raj Bhopal, professor

Raj.Bhopal@ed.ac.uk, Public Health Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AG

Colin Fischbacher, clinical research fellow

Public Health Sciences, University of Edinburgh, Edinburgh EH8 9AG


Add to CiteULike CiteULike   Add to Complore Complore   Add to Connotea Connotea   Add to Del.icio.us Del.icio.us   Add to Digg Digg   Add to Reddit Reddit   Add to StumbleUpon StumbleUpon   Add to Technorati Technorati    What's this?

Relevant Article

Prognosis for South Asian and white patients newly admitted to hospital with heart failure in the United Kingdom: historical cohort study
Hanna M Blackledge, James Newton, and Iain B Squire
BMJ 2003 327: 526-531. [Abstract] [Full Text] [PDF]

Access jobs at BMJ Careers
Whats new online at Student BMJ