Diabetes and heart disease: periodic health examination programs.

MULTIPLE diagnoses are commonly found in any account of morbidity in a given population. Even in the employed group of working men, who form the population of this study, an astoundingly high proportion were found to have major pathological conditions singly or combined. The most common of these were diabetes, hypertension, and coronary artery disease. Among the 14,092 men examined over an average period of 4.9 years, 4,806 (34%) had or developed one or more of these three conditions. Out of these 4,806 men, 1,055 (22%1,o ) had or attained two or three of these diagnoses. Epidemiologic reports of the occurrence of each of the three diseases are numerous; there are only few attempts to describe the coprevalence, coincidence, sequential incidence, mortality, and fatality of these conditions in a large sample of serially studied persons.