Importance of Angiotensin-Converting Enzyme Inhibitors in Myocardial Infarction and Congestive Heart Failure: Implications for Clinical Practice

Prof. Tsung O. Cheng, MD, Department of Medicine, Division of Cardiology, George Washington University Medical Center, 2150 Pennsylvania Avenue, Washington, DC 20037 (USA) Dear Sir, I enjoyed reading the superb article on angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors in myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure by Pitt [1]. However, I was very surprised to find that most of the acronyms for the various trials were unexplained [2-4]. To make the situation even worse, many of the acronyms were not even capitalized in their entirety, e.g., Achieve instead of ACHIEVE, Aire instead of AIRE, Atlas instead of ATLAS, Consensus instead of CONSENSUS, Elite instead of ELITE, Gissi instead of GIS-SI, Hope instead of HOPE, Isis instead of ISIS, Quiet instead of QUIET, Save instead of SAVE, and Solvd instead of SOLVD. How are uninitiated readers going to know which words are acronyms and which are ordinary words? For your frustrated readers I would like to refer them to the latest list of acronyms of cardiologic trials published recently in the Journal of Cardiology [5]. References Pitt B: Importance of angiotensin-converting enzyme inhibitors in myocardial infarction and congestive heart failure: Implications for clinical practice. Cardiology 1995;86(suρpl 1):4145. Cheng TO: Acronyms must be defined when first used. J Clin Epidemiol 1994;47:960. Cheng TO: Use of unexplained acronyms in specialty journals. Int J Cardiol 1994;46:185188. Cheng TO: Acronyms should be explained. Atherosclerosis 1994;111:143-160. Cheng TO: Acronyms of clinical trials in cardiology1995. J Cardiol 1995;25:273-285.