In this issue of The Journal (p 2535), Thompson and his colleagues report that during a six-year period only 12 men died during jogging in Rhode Island. The authors then estimated how many joggers were active in this period, using a random telephone survey, and concluded that one death occurred per year for every 7,620 joggers, or per 396,000 man-hours of jogging.
All but one of these deaths were presumed to have been due to coronary heart disease (CHD). Coroners autopsies disclosed one- or two-vessel CHD in six cases. The coroner elected not to perform autopsies in three other cases in which there had been a clinical history of CHD. Almost half of the deaths (five) occurred in men in whom a premortem diagnosis was possible; however, even discounting these deaths, death occurred more often during jogging than would be expected by chance. The meaning of this is not certain,