Risk Factors of Coronary Artery Disease in Secondary Prevention--Results from the AtheroGene--Study.

Risk factors are important in cardiovascular (CV) medicine for risk stratification of patients. We aimed to compare the traditional risk factors to clinical variables for the prediction of secondary cardiovascular events.For this study, 3229 patients with known coronary artery disease (CAD) were included. We calculated whether the traditional risk factors, diabetes mellitus, increased LDL/HDL ratio, arterial hypertension and smoking alone and in combination with the clinical variables, ejection fraction, creatinine clearance, multi-vessel disease and CRP concentration predict the outcome cardiovascular death or non-fatal myocardial infarction (N = 432) during the mean follow-up time of 4.2 ± 2.0 years. In this cohort diabetes mellitus was the risk factor with the strongest influence regarding occurrence of secondary events (hazard ratio; HR:1.70, confidence interval; CI 95%: 1.36-2.11; P0.0001) or calculated creatinine clearence (Cockroft-Gault formula) (HR:2.26 CI 95%:1.78-2.89; P