Objective: The Acute Myocardial Infarction Regional Registry of Tuscany was aimed to assess incidence and prognosis of acute myocardial infarction (AMI) in Tuscany, and the spread of interventional cardiology (coronarography and coronary angioplasty) in AMI treatment.
Design: Record-linkage between current hospitalisation and mortality databases, aimed to identify total events (hospitalised AMI cases + out-of-hospital coronary deaths), also including recurrent events (rule of 28 days or more after any previous event in the same patient).
Setting: Population based registry (residents in Tuscany).
Main outcome measures: Age-standardised attack rates, 28-day case-fatality and proportion of patients who underwent coronarography or coronary angioplasty.
Results: In Tuscany, between 1997 and 2002, AMI attack rates were stable in both genders. Rates of out-of-hospital coronary death (progressively decreasing) and of hospitalised AMI cases (increasing after the year 2000) showed opposite trends. Case-fatality decreased both for total events (largely explained by the reduction of out-of-hospital deaths) and for hospitalised cases. In the same period, the spread of coronarography and coronary angioplasty progressively increased. AMI attack rates and interventional cardiology procedures utilization were significantly different across Tuscany areas, whereas 28-day case-fatality of hospitalised cases did not significantly differ within the region.
Conclusions: Notwithstanding the importance of cardiovascular disease, scanty population-based incidence, case-fatality and treatment data were available in Italy. Monitoring systems based on current hospitalisation and mortality databases could represent an economical and timely tools, providing data useful in a public health perspective and for health planning. The validation of diagnostic codes with standardised criteria could ensure the comparability with other Italian areas.