Screening patients with chest pain in the emergency department using electron beam tomography: a follow-up study.

Objectives: The high sensitivity of electron beam tomography (EBT) in the detection of coronary artery calcium (CAC) and obstructive coronary artery disease prompted us to investigate the association between CAC detection and future cardiac events in patients with acute chest pain syndromes requiring hospitalization.

Background: Three studies have documented that EBT is a rapid and efficient screening tool for patients admitted to the emergency department (ED) with chest pain, but there is a paucity of long-term follow-up data on these chest pain patients.

Methods: We conducted a prospective observational study of 192 patients admitted to the ED of a large tertiary care hospital for chest pain syndromes.

Pathology of the radial and internal thoracic arteries used as coronary artery bypass grafts.

Background: This investigation compared the incidence and the degree of atherosclerosis present in radial artery (RA) and internal thoracic artery segments remaining after coronary artery bypass grafting.

Methods: One hundred seventy specimens from 102 patients were histologically analyzed, including 106 RA specimens.

Results: The mean degree of pathology for the RA was 0.

Effect of hematocrit on adenosine diphosphate-induced aggregation of human platelets in tube flow.

Both chemical and physical effects of red cells are known to play a role in the adenosine diphosphate (ADP)-induced aggregation of human platelets in sheared blood. Using a previously described double infusion technique (Bell et al., 1989a), we studied the effect of increasing hematocrit from 10 to 60% on the rate and extent of platelet aggregation with 0.