Claris Law Legal Blogging Community

Editor: Robert Blanchard
Profession: Attorney at Law

Category: Ortho Evra Medical Information

Heart attack is one of the injuries that can arise from the Ortho Evra Patch.

The studies consistently found that patients of generalists were at greater risk of mortality from both cardiac and noncardiac risk factors and had higher unadjusted mortality rates. Studies varied as to whether or not generalists had higher mortality rates after adjusting for risk factors.

The generalists may have treated higher risk patients because patients who were too old or sick to want heroic intervention measures or revascularization procedures did not want to be referred to cardiologists. It is also possible that generalists' patients were at higher risk because they had greater delay in accessing care. It is unclear why adjusting for patient risk factors did not give consistent findings across studies. We hypothesized that the procedures used to take into account patient risk were not adequate and that the most valid results would be those that had the least differences between the patients of generalist and specialists or that did the best job of accounting for differences in patient risk. The best studies may have been the ones that had similar age patients for generalists and specialists, that excluded older patients, or that adjusted for the most complete set of risk factors. All these found that cardiologists and generalists had similar adjusted mortality rates. On the other hand, the studies that had the greatest patient differences between specialties (as indicated by large differences in age or baseline 1-year mortality rates), or that used fewer risk factors for adjustment found the greatest differences between the cardiologists and generalists.