ABSTRACT

In 1994, within a period of 9 months, 250 indoor patients with coronary heart disease /CHD/ have been interviewed who were treated in the intensive wards of the First and Third City Hospitals of Sofia. The diagnosis of the patients drown up from their history was made by the physicians of these wards, on the basis of clinical, laboratory and electro-cardiographic data. As controls, 260 patients from the same hospitals were interviewed who were at the same time indoor patients of the hospital for their sick ears, eyes, noses or were taken in for small surgical interventions. In this group, patients with sick cardiovascular systems or with other system diseases, as for example diabetes, blood disease, renal disease were not included.

In the questionnaire, information about selected demographic, social and clinical indicators was given. The data about blood pressure and the routine tests for the blood sugar and the total cholesterol were drawn-up from the patients history. In this study, the following factors were included: age, sex, place of residence, education, profession, hereditary taint, systolic blood pressure, diastolic blood pressure, blood glucose, total cholesterol, index of the body mass, smoking, alcohol consumption, coffee consumption and physical load. Information about the nutrition habits of the patients was also included via the basic foods in their weekly menu.

Out of the above disclosed data we can see that about 30-40 % of the total number of patients with CHD are hereditary tainted. The connection between the increased blood pressure, the increased value of the blood glucose and the total cholesterol and the high index of the body mass on the one part and the frequency of CHD on the other part, has been specially underlined. Out of the analysis made with smokers it became clear, that for the patients interviewed, a dependence between smoking and the CHD was stated solely with the people smoking more than 20-cigarettes per day. On the contrary, the total juxtaposition between smokers and non-smokers failed to show a clear connection between the group of cases with CHD and the controls.

These examinations are in compliance with the literature. However, the reasons for the high morbidity of CHD in Bulgaria have still not been well clarified, although the attention is speculatively focussed on the Balkan diet mainly and not very much on the life style as the most probable cause for this fact.