ACC/AHA 2002 guideline update for the management of patients with chronic stable angina - Summary article: A report of the American College of Cardiology/American Heart Association Task Force on Practice Guidelines (Committee on the Management of Patients With Chronic Stable Angina)

"The American College of Cardiology (ACC)/American Heart Association (AHA) Task Force on Practice Guidelines regularly reviews existing guidelines to determine when an update or a full revision is needed. This process gives priority to areas in which major changes in text, and particularly recommendations, are merited on the basis of new understanding or evidence. Minor changes in verbiage and references are discouraged. The ACC/AHA/American College of Physicians–American Society of Internal Medicine (ACP-ASIM) Guidelines for the Management of Patients With Chronic Stable Angina, which were published in June 1999, have now been updated. The full-text guideline incorporating the updated material is available on the Internet (www.acc.org or www.americanheart.org) in both a track-changes version showing the changes in the 1999 guideline in strike-out (deleted text) and highlighting (new text) and a “clean” version that fully incorporates all the changes. This summary article describes the 4 most important areas of change reflected in the update in a format that we hope can be read and understood as a stand-alone document. Interested readers are referred to the full-length version on the Internet to completely understand the location of these changes within the full-length guideline, as well as their proper context. The full-length guideline includes some additional changes that are not reflected in this summary article. All new references appear in bold-faced type; all original references appear in normal type. Although the primary focus of this guideline is on symptomatic patients, asymptomatic patients with known or suspected coronary disease are included in this update and are described in Section V.