Immediate prognosis in recurrent myocardial infarction.

Of 880 patients admitted consecutively to a coronary-care unit with acute myocardial infarction, 200 had had a previous infarction. The mortality-rate in the first twenty-eight days after infarction was higher in the group with recurrent infarction (26 per cent) than in the group with first infarctions (16.9 per cent). When the patients were matched for sex and age this difference in mortality-rate was only statistically significant in men aged less than seventy. In patients with previous infarctions the short-term prognosis was worse in those with two or more previous infarctions, in those in whom infarction had occurred less than three months before, and in those with a previous infarction in the anteroseptal wall.