FRIDAY, May 9 (HealthDay News) -- The presence of carotid bruits is useful in predicting which patients are at an elevated risk of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular death, according to an article published in the May 10 issue of The Lancet.
Christopher A. Pickett, M.D., of Walter Reed Army Medical Center in Washington, D.C., and colleagues performed a meta-analysis of studies reporting an incidence of myocardial infarction or cardiovascular mortality in order to investigate whether carotid bruits had prognostic value in predicting risk of myocardial infarction and cardiovascular death.
The researchers identified 22 relevant studies, which included 17,295 patients, with a median sample size of 273 patients followed-up for four years. The rate of myocardial infarction was 3.69 per 100 patient-years in patients with carotid bruits compared to 1.86 per 100 patient-years in those without. In the four studies in which direct comparisons of patients with and without bruits were possible, patients with carotid bruits had more than twice the risk of myocardial infarction and cardiovascular death than those without bruits.
"Our analysis shows that the presence of a carotid bruit meets the definition of a coronary risk equivalent, with a 3.7 percent risk per year (37 percent over 10 years) of cardiac events when a carotid bruit is detected," the authors write. "Therefore, the presence of a carotid bruit alone should be regarded as an equivalent of coronary heart disease and would warrant the same aggressive modification of cardiac risk factors that are recommended for diabetes or peripheral arterial disease."
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