Screening for hypercholesterolaemia in primary care: randomised controlled trial of postal questionnaire appraising risk of coronary heart disease

Objectives: To validate a self administered postal questionnaire appraising risk of coronary heart disease. To determine whether use of this questionnaire increased the percentage of people at high risk of coronary heart disease and decreased the percentage of people at low risk who had their cholesterol concentration measured.

Secondary prevention in coronary heart disease: baseline survey of provision in general practice

Objective: To determine secondary preventive treatment and habits among patients with coronary heart disease in general practice.

Secondary prevention clinics for coronary heart disease: randomised trial of effect on health

Objective: To evaluate the effects of secondary prevention clinics run by nurses in general practice on the health of patients with coronary heart disease.

Estimating trends and seasonality in coronary heart disease

We present two methods of estimating the trend, seasonality and noise in time series of coronary heart disease events. In contrast to previous work we use a non-linear trend, allow multiple seasonal components, and carefully examine the residuals from the fitted model. We show the importance of estimating these three aspects of the observed data to aid insight of the underlying process, although our major focus is on the seasonal components. For one method we allow the seasonal effects to vary over time and show how this helps the understanding of the association between coronary heart disease and varying temperature patterns. Copyright (C) 2004 John Wiley Sons, Ltd.