Cross-cultural validation of the coronary-prone behavior pattern

In an all male case-control study, 149 myocardial infarction patients were compared with 80 medical patients not having cardiovascular disease and 88 healthy controls in terms of selected behavioral and coronary heart disease risk factors. Coronary patients were drawn from the Centre for Cardiological Rehabilitation (Inowroclaw, Poland), rheumatic disease patients from a treatment sanitorium, and the healthy controls from two local industries and the local municipality. The major behavioral assessment was the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS), designed to measure the coronary-prone behavior pattern, Type A. Coronary patients were found to score significantly more in the Type A and hard-driving directions than those men free of coronary disease. Rheumatic patients tended to score more like coronary cases than controls on most scales. These results replicate with striking similarity findings reported earlier for two separate U.S. samples of retrospective coronary cases and controls. The Polish coronary cases were also compared in terms of other demographic and biological variables and found to be similar to several prevalence samples studied in the U.S.A. This study provides the first evidence linking the Type A coronary-prone behavior pattern, as measured by the JAS, to clinical coronary disease outside the United States.