Almanac 2011: Stable Coronary Artery Disease. the National Society Journals Present Selected Research That Has Driven Recent Advances in Clinical Cardiology

The widespread application of specialist clinics for early evaluation of patients with chest pain has focused attention on the effectiveness of diagnostic testing. In a study of nearly 400 000 patients with suspected coronary artery disease, the diagnostic yield of cardiac catheterisation was only 37.6%, leading to calls for better strategies for risk stratification. 1 As pointed out in correspondence, the low yield was probably due to verification bias, itself a consequence of basing referral decisions in low-risk populations on noninvasive tests such as exercise ECG