[The effect of smoking habit on aortic pulse wave velocity using a new method for data analysis]

We measured aortic pulse wave velocity (PWV) in 168 male adult cases of various arteriosclerotic diseases. In order to evaluate the effects of age, smoking habits, alcohol intake, and blood pressure, we applied the least median of squares (LMS) regression which was considered to be very useful for data analysis. The results showed that PWV level increased with age. Furthermore smoking was associated with increasing PWV level and this effect was also related to age. We concluded that the PWV was valuable as an index of arteriosclerosis, and instead of the classical least squares method, LMS regression was very useful for analysis of medical data.