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METHODS

This study was based at Hamad General Hospital, Doha, Qatar, which is the only tertiary care centre in the country and so all patients with ACS are treated here. The Hamad General Hospital cardiology database was used for this study; this database comprises data collected from all patients admitted to the cardiology department at the hospital since January 1991. Data were collected from the clinical records by the patients’ physicians at the time of the patients’ hospital discharge according to predefined criteria for each data point. We focused our study only on Qatari patients because it is a stable population and avoids the bias in the fluctuation of the expatriate population in the country. Furthermore, more than 95% of Qatari adults regularly practise fasting. The study was approved by the institution review board.