Sickness absence before the first clinical episode of coronary heart disease.

Abstract

There is a common belief that coronary (ischaemic) heart disease strikes healthy people without warning, and that it is related to personality (Dunbar, 1948) ; for example, the over-conscientious or the ambitious man. For these reasons, and in order to look for possible indications of future coronary disease, we took the opportunity while working with the records of London Transport Executive em ployees (Morris, Heady, Raffle, Roberts, and Parks, 1953) to compare the previous sickness experience of men suffering from a first clinical episode of coronary heart disease with the experience of other men chosen as controls. The idea was to make a preliminary examination, using data which would be sufficient to demonstrate a striking difference, though possibly not numerous enough to show a small one. With the material and methods at our disposal we felt that only a large difference would be worth following up.