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Figure 4 (A) Frequency of patients having coronary angiography before emergency repair of the aorta and (B) in-hospital mortality over time. Patients were divided into quintiles (n = 25, 25, 24, 24, 24) with the first quintile (1) including the first patient in 1982 and the fifth quintile (5) including the last patient in 1997. (A) These data demonstrate a statistically significant trend towards the decreased use of coronary angiography at our institution in the preoperative management of patients with life threatening pathology of the aorta (p < 0.001). Due to sample size limitations, a similar analysis could not be made with the data in (B).