In order of decreasing importance, the variables included age, LVEF, smoking, white blood cell count, presence of diabetes mellitus, casual (any time of day without regard to time since the last meal) blood glucose concentration, creatinine, prior stroke, frequent angina, findings at coronary angiography, lipid-lowering treatment, QT interval on the resting ECG, systolic hypertension, number of drugs used for angina, prior infarction, and sex.1216 Because the populations enrolled in these studies varied and the results have not been indepen- dently validated, additional prospective studies of patients with established SIHD are required to establish appropriate follow-up evaluation strategies and to establish efficient time intervals for evaluation in stable patients.307,320,1223,1224 6.2. Follow-Up of Patients With SIHD Standard risk assessment tools that have been developed from clinical and laboratory evaluation of ambulatory populations with suspected CAD, as discussed in detail in Section 2 of this guideline, include patients who have noncardiac causes of presenting symptoms. Estimates of the likelihood of future cardiac events using the Framingham score,508,1225 which was Fihn et al Stable Ischemic Heart Disease: Full Text e427 derived from populations that included large numbers of low-risk individuals without disease in their low-risk subsets, are not generally useful when applied to patients with known SIHD. In fact, prediction of risk for coronary mortality and coronary events during short-term and long-term follow-up of patients with SIHD differs from risk stratification in less- ascertained populations with chest pain syndromes. Although mortality and morbidity rates intuitively might be considered to be higher in patients with documented as opposed to suspected IHD, several circumstances serve to confound this assumption. Patients at highest risk, for example, are often identified and aggressively treated during the course of ACS or during initial risk assessment of chest pain. 