Material and Method: A hospital based retrospective study was carried out to investigate the prevalence of CAD and cardiovascular risk factors of these two ethnic and religious groups at Nopparat Rajathanee Hospital between June 2012 and December 2012. All Thai Muslim patients aged ≥35 years who visited the internal medicine outpatient department (OPD) were studied. The compared population was randomly selected and matched by age and sex from the Thai Buddhist patients in the same period.

Results: Five hundred seventy nine patients with median age of 62 years (interquartile range = 24) were studied. There were 289 Thai Muslims and 290 Thai Buddhists. The prevalence of definite CAD in Muslims (14.2%) was significantly higher than the prevalence in Buddhists (6.2%) (p = 0.002). The prevalence of diabetes mellitus, hypertension, high total cholesterol (≥240 mg/dl), and high triglyceride in Muslims were significantly higher. For high-density lipoprotein cholesterol (HDL-C), only Muslim females showed significantly higher prevalence of low HDL-C than that of Buddhist females.

Conclusion: Thai Muslims showed significantly higher prevalence of definite CAD than that of Thai Buddhists. The greater prevalence of certain risk factors may contribute to higher prevalence of CAD in Thai Muslim patients.

Keywords: Ethnic differences, Thai Muslims, Coronary artery disease