β-Adrenergic Blockade for Survivors of Acute Myocardial Infarction

To the Editor: In their review of β-adrenergic blockade for survivors of acute myocardial infarction (March 29 issue),¹ Frishman et al. note that a large proportion of patients stand to benefit from βblockade therapy. In fact in the four placebo-controlled, randomized, double-blind clinical trials that provided population data,^{2 3 4 5} the proportion of survivors of acute myocardial infarction found eligible for this therapy was only 13 percent in the study by Hansteen et al., 23 percent in the β-blocker heart attack trial, 45 percent in the study by Julian et al., and 52 percent in the Norwegian timolol.