Baseline Characteristics
We identified 76 patients that met inclusion criteria: 38 were patients
at Hospital A and 38 were patients at Hospital B. The mean age of the
included patients was 51.7years, and 93% of the patients were male. We
found no statistically significant differences among the included
patients between both hospitals in terms of age (P- value= 0.322),
gender (P- value= 0.500) or the percentage of overweight
(P- value= 0.911). In contrast, we found a statically significant
difference among the nationality distribution among the aforementioned
two hospitals (P- value< 0.001) (Table 1) .
Only 12% of the patients reported smoking;47% of the patients had one
or more documented comorbidities. The most prevalent comorbidity was
diabetes mellitus (DM) being present in 36% of the patients, followed
by hypertension (32%), and ischemic heart disease (IHD) with 11%. We
also found a statistically significant difference in the prevalence
rates of hypertension between patients between the two hospitals
(P -value = 0.048) (Figure 1) .