Objective: To study the correation between carotid artery atherosclerosis and coronary heart disease (CHD). Methods: Color Doppler flow imaging was employed to evaluate carotid artery atherosclerosis in 90 patients with CHD, carotid artery ultrasonography and coronary angiography were performed simultaneously in 20 cases. Results: The thickness of internus-middle membrane and the index number of atheroma both increased remarkably in all cases, and the group with MI had obvious abnomal parameter of blood stream in internal carotid artery. The conformed rate of coronary angiography with ultrasonography in carotid is 75 % in 20 cases,and the moreserious the pathological change of coronary is, the higher the happening rate of carotid artery atherosclerosis is. Conclusion: The degrees of carotid artery atherosclerosis can reflect the degree of pathological changes of coronary indirectly.

Objective　To investigate the association between gene polymorphism of the plasminogen activator inhibitor-1 (PAI-1) and myocardial infarction (MI) in Chinese. Methods　PAI-1 genotyping with polymerase chain reaction-restriction fragment length polymorphism (PCR-RFLP) and allele specific polymerase chain reaction (ASPCR) was performed in 87 myocardial infarction patients and 92 unrelated healthy controls. All subjects'clinical features and PAI-1 activity were tested. Results　There were two polymorphisms within the promoter, a G/A single base substitution polymorphism upstream at -844*!bp, and a single guanosine deletion/insertion 4G/5G polymorphism -675*!bp upstream from the start of transcription. Significant differences between the patients and the controls were observed neither for the frequencies of the GG, GA and AA genotypes nor for the PAI-1 activities of these three types. But for the 4G/5G polymorphism, there were significant differences between patients and controls for the frequencies of the 4G/4G, 4G/5G and 5G/5G genotypes (P<0.05). In the MI group, the PAI-1 activity of the 4G/4G type was significantly higher than that of the 5G/5G type (P<0.05). Further more, a positive correlation between the glucose level and PAI-1 activity was found (r=0.34, P=0.02). Conclusion　This study indicates that the 4G/5G gene polymorphism of PAI-1 is associated with myocardial infarction, that 4G/4G type is probably an important hereditary risk factor, and that glucose has functional importance in regulating PAI-1 activity.