TUESDAY, March 23 (HealthDay News) -- In patients admitted to the intensive care unit with acute chest pain, a high supine systolic blood pressure is associated with a reduced risk of one-year mortality, according to research published in the March 24/31 issue of the Journal of the American Medical Association.
Ulf Stenestrand, M.D., of Linköping University in Sweden, and colleagues analyzed 1997 to 2007 data on 119,151 patients who were treated at intensive care units in Sweden for chest pain.
In the researchers' adjusted analysis, one-year mortality rate showed that patients with a systolic blood pressure at or above 163 mm Hg had the best prognosis (hazard ratio, 0.76) compared to patients with a reading of 128 to 144 mm Hg. They also found that the corresponding hazard ratios for patients with readings of less than 128 mm Hg or 145 to 162 mm Hg were 1.46 and 0.83, respectively.
"Early risk stratification of patients with acute coronary syndromes is important in clinical decisions regarding treatment alternatives," the authors write. "Our study results support the feasibility of incorporating systolic admission blood pressure in risk scoring models and are consistent with a U.S. prospective investigation of six-month post-discharge all-cause mortality risks in patients with acute chest pain, in which information about vital status was available for 87.5 percent of the enrolled 17,142 participants."
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