Moreover, most of the studies on AMI were evaluated in male selleckbio gender. It is not clear whether gender differences also exist in the medical care of AMI in Asia. In addition, the gender effects on hospitalization cost between ST elevation (STEMI) and non-ST elevation (NSTEMI) AMI has not been evaluated. National Health Insurance (NHI) has provided medical care in all humans in Taiwan since 1995 [17]. Therefore, analyzing the database from NHI would provide the real-world community-based data on hospitalization cost and length of different gender. 2. Method2.1. Study PopulationThis study used the nationwide inpatient data from NHI, which can provide the database including the medical expenditure, admission periods, and co-morbidities [17, 18].
The NHI data included the data from the 23 million residents of the island’s population, which contained 1,000,000 subjects from 1999 to 2008. The files were decoded by Graduate Institute of Biomedical Informatics, College of Medical Science and Technology, Taipei Medical University [19]. Patients with AMI were identified from the ICD-9 codes from 410.0 to 410.6 for STEMI and from 410.7 and 410.9 for NSTEMI [1]. We included the patients with the primary diagnosis with AMI (elevated and nonelevated) during hospitalization, which include the patients with any possibilities of co-morbidities without age limitation (age from 16 to 96 years old). We excluded the patients admitted more than one year, since the data on these patients cross over the next year and will not fit year analysis used in this study and excluded old MI patients admitted for other illness.
The hospitalized percentages were calculated from the ratio of admitted patients with AMI over the total admitted patients. The medical centers and non-medical centers were qualified by Taiwan Joint Commission on Hospital Accreditation.2.2. Statistical AnalysisContinuous variables were expressed as mean �� standard deviation (SD). Gender differences, medical center and non-medical center differences, and lower and higher hospitalization cost differences were compared by using unpaired Student’s t-test, one-way analysis of variance (ANOVA), Entinostat or two-way ANONA with post hoc of Fisher’s method. Categorical variables were reported as frequencies and compared using ax2 or Fisher exact test if at least one cell had an expected cell count below 5. A two-tailed probability of P < 0.05 was considered statistically significant. All statistical analyses were performed with SPSS (version 13.0) or SigmaStat (version 3.5).3. ResultsFigure 1 shows hospitalization percentages of AMI from 1999 to 2008.