Heart failure in patients seeking medical help at outpatients clinics. Part I. General characteristics.

Background: During the last decade, the beneficial changes in lifestyle and in medical care increased average life expectancy, particularly in patients with chronic diseases such as hypertension and coronary heart disease. Unfortunately this also increased the number of patients, particularly among the elderly, who are susceptible to complications of these conditions such as heart failure. Uncontrolled hypertension is known to be a primary cause of heart failure and is also known to be very prevalent and frequently uncontrolled in the Polish population.

Poland-US collaborative study on cardiovascular epidemiology: classification agreement between US National Cholesterol Education Program and European Atherosclerosis Society hyperlipidemia guidelines in selected Polish and US populations.

Data from two epidemiological studies are used to measure the degree to which two well-known guidelines agree in measuring hyperlipidemia in population samples in the US and Poland. The epidemiological studies are the US Lipid Research Clinics Program Prevalence Study and the Pol-MONICA project in Poland and the guidelines are those adopted by the US National Cholesterol Program (USNCEP) and by the European Atherosclerosis Society (EAS). EAS guidelines were analyzed in two ways: Method 1 used triglycerides and total cholesterol only in classifying persons as hyperlipidemics or non-hyperlipidemics; Method 2 used triglycerides, total cholesterol and nine additional risk factors in the classification process.

[Long-term Pol-MONICA-Warsaw project: distribution of lipids in the population and the effect of selected factors on their levels].

The authors present the results of first screening of random sample of population aged 35-64 years of two Warsaw districts (Praga South and Praga North). The screening was performed within framework of the international WHO-MONICA Project in 1984. 1309 men and 1337 women were screened (response rate 72.

[Prevalence of hypertension in the population of the right-bank Warsaw districts based on research from the Pol-Monica study].

In 1984 a group of 1309 men and 1337 women aged 35-64 years were studied in the population of Warsaw. The standardized mean systolic blood pressure was 143.4 mm Hg in men and 144.