Coronary-Prone Behavior Pattern

To the Editor.  —In his response¹ to our commentary on the coronary-prone behavior pattern,² Ray H. Rosenman, MD, seems to have missed the point.We noted that Friedman and Rosenman had originally described five categories of behavior (Al, A2, B3, B4, and C).² When these five individual categories did not show sufficient discriminating power for coronary risk in the Western Collaborative Group Study, they were consolidated and reduced to the two coarse A and B types for which a distinction could be demonstrated. Because we believe that "human behavior is far too complex to be suitably described in the two categories of A or B,"² we speculated about reasons why the original five types—although each important—might have yielded false-negative results in the Western Collaborative Group Study. The population may have been too constrained in its white-collar male volunteers; the behavior was identified with structured questionnaires and