Many civil liberties advocates say they recognize the insurers' right to screen out people who have pre-existing diseases.

Patients may also have a history of poor dental hygiene, or pre-existing valvular disease.

Both told me, 'We don't cover people with pre-existing renal disease.'

Four years later, the claimant was found to have a pre-existing spinal disease unrelated to the accident which gradually rendered him unable to work.

Until the results of prospective studies are available, patients with pre-existing cardiac disease should be closely monitored, particularly for cardiac arrhythmias.

When this condition is caused by a pre-existing disease, like sickle cell, it is known as secondary pulmonary hypertension.

Patients with pre-existing peripheral vascular disease or ischemia of the ascending (right) colon may be at increased risk for complications or death.

Deaths resulting from pre-existing disease, or disease not caused by pregnancy, but aggravated by being pregnant.

This difference was not explained by smoking, alcohol intake, level of physical activity, or by pre-existing diseases such as diabetes or heart disease.

More people die because of the impact of the trauma of surgery on a pre-existing disease, he said.