The gender differential in mortality from all causes, cardiovascular disease (CVD), ischaemic heart disease (IHD) and stroke during the mean follow-up of 11.6 years (range 10-14) was examined among 4696 men and 5714 women aged 45-64 at entry in West of Scotland. Overall mortality was 19.4/1000 person-years of observation among men and 10.8/1000 person-years among women. A multiple logistic regression model was used to control the influence of gender, along with seven other cardiovascular risk factors simultaneously. The risk factors considered were age, systolic (SBP) and diastolic blood pressure (DBP), serum cholesterol, causal blood glucose, body mass index (BMI) and cigarette smoking. Both the prevalence of risk factors and relative mortality risk associated with them differed by gender. Adjustment slightly reduced the gender differential in overall mortality from 2 to 1.9 and from 1.5 to 1.4 for stroke deaths. Multiple logistic regression increased minimally the gender differential for mortality from 2.4 to 2.8 for CVD and from 2.8 to 3.4 for IHD, suggesting that these cardiovascular risk factors do not account for the overall gender difference in mortality rates. Age, SBP, DBP, blood glucose and cigarette smoking were significant predictors of mortality for both genders. Serum cholesterol was a statistically significant predictor of CVD death only for men.