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Doctors occasionally encounter QRS prolongation on the ECG of persons without clinical evidence of coronary disease. To determine the prognostic importance of this finding, investigators from the Framingham Study reviewed the records of subjects who were examined in the mid-1960s and followed for 18 years.
On the first ECG on which the QRS was measured, 197 of 3608 subjects without known coronary disease had a QRS duration defined as prolonged (at least 0.09 seconds); 68 had a duration of 0.12 seconds or longer. QRS prolongation predicted a slightly increased incidence of subsequent coronary events, but this effect disappeared when the analysis was adjusted for other ECG abnormalities such as ventricular ectopy or hypertrophy. The lack of as…