Despite evidence that social support and various aspects of negative affect may influence prognosis after a myocardial infarction, the impact of psychosocial supportive interventions had not been demonstrated. Further, little was known about the impact of psychosocial and/or interventions among women patients. Previous work by Nancy Frasure-Smith and colleagues suggested that a one-year post-myocardial infarction program of monthly telephone monitoring of psychological stress symptoms, coupled with home nursing visits for patients reporting high stress levels, had an impact on one-year cardiac mortality and long-term myocardial infarction recurrences among men. However, methodological difficulties prevented drawing firm conclusions. A trial which corrected for these difficulties was conducted involving 948 post-myocardial infarction patients. However, the project was too small to study enough patients to assess program impact separately for men and women. The trial was supported by Canadian sources. The NHLBI supplemented the study in order to expand the sample size from 948 patients to 1,376 patients to allow gender analysis.