Type A behaviour in two ethnic rural communities of males in Israel with and without coronary heart disease

In an all male case-control study, 40 coronary heart disease patients were compared with 80 controls without coronary disease in terms of selected behavioural variables. The coronary patients were drawn from several rural villages receiving medical care from the Shimshon Medical Centre in Israel. The controls were selected at random from the computerized medical records of the Centre. The major behavioural assessment was the Jenkins Activity Survey (JAS) designed to measure the coronary-prone behaviour pattern (Type A). Coronary patients were found to score significantly more in the Type A direction than those men free of coronary disease. These results replicate earlier findings reported for several U.S.A. and European samples of retrospective coronary cases and controls. The Israeli sample was also compared in terms of other demographic variables and found to be similar to the prevalence samples studied in the U.S.A. This study is one of the first to provide evidence linking the Type A coronary-prone behaviour patterns, as measured by the JAS, to coronary disease in a rural population outside the United States. In addition, cases scored consistently higher than controls for both ethnic groups studied.