TY - JOUR T1 - LEft bundle-branch block and the ecg in diagnosis of acute myocardial infarction—reply AU - Shlipak MG, Go AS, Browner WS Y1 - 1999/10/06 N1 - 10-1001/pubs.JAMA-ISSN-0098-7484-282-13-jbk1006 JO - JAMA SP - 1224 EP - 1225 VL - 282 IS - 13 N2 - The poor prognosis for patients with right BBB who experience myocardial infarction has been demonstrated by many prior investigators,2 and was confirmed by recent work in which the in-hospital mortality for these patients was 22.6%, nearly identical to that in patients with left BBB (23%).3 In designing our decision analysis, we were aware that the FTT analysis included some patients with right BBB within the designation of "bundle-branch block."4 That this category has a predominance of patients with right BBB is speculation on the part of Sgarbossa and colleagues. We chose the estimate of thrombolytic-related stroke from the entire sample of the trials because the relatively small sample of the BBB subgroup made that stroke estimate imprecise. However, we did perform our analysis using the stroke value mentioned by Sgarbossa and colleagues (2.1%). Under these conditions, the threshold for the likelihood of AMI such that "thrombolysis for all" is superior to "apply ECG algorithm" increased to 16%, but was still less than the rate of AMI we actually found of 28% (95% CI, 17%-40%). SN - 0098-7484 M3 - doi: 10-1001/pubs.JAMA-ISSN-0098-7484-282-13-jbk1006 UR - http://dx.doi.org/10-1001/pubs.JAMA-ISSN-0098-7484-282-13-jbk1006 ER -