Background: To assess the determinants of short-term and one-year prognosis of all patients with suspected acute coronary syndrome seen by the cardiologist on duty in the Emergency Service of a tertiary hospital during a six month period.
Patients and methods: 153 consecutive patients with a diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction, 225 with a diagnosis of unstable angina and 89 with a diagnosis of atypical chest pain were identified and their in-hospital characteristics and one-year prognosis were prospectively assessed.
Results: Age was higher than 65 years in 53% of acute myocardial infarction and in 54% of unstable angina patients. Only 3 patients were lost to follow-up. 35% of acute myocardial infarction patients had died or had reinfarction after one year and 16% of unstable angina patients had died or had suffered acute myocardial infarction. Baseline features, management patterns and prognosis of patients admitted with acute myocardial infarction to the Cardiology Service, to other hospital areas or to other hospitals were markedly different, and admission in areas other than the Cardiology Service was an independent mortality predictor. In unstable angina, complications happened in patients older than 75 years, those with previous revascularization procedures, those undergoing revascularization or those with lesions not deemed revascularizeable.
Conclusions: a) In the study population there was a predominance of elderly patients; the proportion of patients with poor prognosis was considerably high; b) a sizeable proportion of patients with severe complications was scarcely represented in the major clinical trials; c) the possibility arises of a distribution of care resources tending to concentrate the greater therapeutic efforts in the patients with good prognosis.