Monitoring the incidence of myocardial infarctions: applications of capture-mark-recapture technology.

It is critical to monitor the incidence of myocardial infarction. Typically, death certificates have been used as a proxy for incidence, however, these have been found to be crude as they lag behind changes in incidence. In the last decade several myocardial infarction registries have been established, however, these registries are still too limited in geographical spread to assess either national or global trends of heart attack. Here we suggest that employing an alternate approach, that of capture-mark-recapture, would be helpful to provide accurate monitoring both within and between countries. This method would complement existing registries by providing a simple and inexpensive means to provide accurate heart attack data across broad geographical areas and time.