Table 2.

Demographics of the studies by diagnosis.

	AMI	HF	Stroke
Number of studies	8 [17–24]	11 [25–35]	7 [36–42]
Publication years	1997 [22]–2008 [17, 20]	1997 [25]–2009 [35]	1995 [38]–2009 [42]
Journal type	Cardiac [20, 22, 24], nephrology [19], general medicine [21], nursing [23], psychology [17], and geriatric [18]	Cardiac [25, 29–32, 34, 35], psychology [26, 33], general medicine [27], and geriatric [28].	Neurology/stroke [36, 39–42], cardiology [37], and psychology [38]
Author discipline	Medicine [18, 19, 21, 24], medicine plus another discipline [17, 20, 22], or nursing [23]	Medicine [25–27, 29–32, 34, 35], medicine plus another discipline [33], or nursing [28]	Medicine [36–42]
Country of study	USA except one [22]	USA	USA
Study question related to comorbidity	3 [17, 19, 21]	4 [25, 26, 31, 33]	3 [36, 38, 40]
Used a comorbidity instrument	CCI [17]	CCI [25], Duke Severity of Illness Checklist [26], Geriatric Depression Scale [26], and Beck Depression Inventory [31, 33]	Hamilton Depression Rating Scale [36]
Main outcomes	Mortality [18, 19, 21, 22], morbidity [20, 21, 23, 24], and disability [17]	Mortality [25, 27, 31], disability [26, 28, 33], QoL [28], and health service utilization [25, 28–30, 32, 34]	Morbidity [38–40, 42], QoL [37, 38], and health service utilization [41]

CCI: Charlson Comorbidity Index, QoL: quality of life.