Women experience more comorbidities after PCI

Kovacic J. Catheter Cardiovasc Interv. 2011;doi:10.1002/ccd.23338.

Issue: December 2011

Women undergoing percutaneous coronary intervention appear to exhibit more comorbidities and adverse prognostic factors and suffer worse outcomes after surgery compared to men, according to results of a recent study.

Annapoorna Kini, MD, associate professor of medicine at Mount Sinai Medical Center, and colleagues analyzed data on more than 13,000 patients who underwent PCI (34.6% women) from 2003 to 2009. At baseline, researchers collected clinical characteristics, procedural details, laboratory data and subsequent in-hospital clinical events, among other test results. The primary outcome was all-cause mortality at 12 months post-PCI; secondary outcomes included mortality attributed to a cardiac cause at 12 months post-PCI.

When compared with men, women were older (69 years vs. 64.8 years), smoked less, were more hypertensive or diabetic, and had higher HDL and LDL levels. Unstable coronary syndrome and Canadian Cardiovascular Society Class III or IV angina was found in more women than men, and required left anterior descending artery PCI. Women also had higher unadjusted rates of death vs. men (1.3% vs. 0.8%; P=.009), as well as death from a cardiac cause (0.7% vs. 0.4%; P=.013) at 30 days post-PCI; these factors were predictive of all-cause death at 1 year post-PCI (OR=1.28). Three years after PCI, the unadjusted rate of death continued to be higher in women vs. men (10.4% vs. 8.4%; P<.0001).

“Our findings extend previous research and definitively show that following PCI women do not have an inherently greater mortality risk compared to men,” Kini said in a press release. “While men did have higher rates of some modifiable risk-factors, such as smoking, women certainly had a far greater overall burden of comorbidities and adverse prognostic factors.”

Disclosure: Dr. Kini reports no relevant financial disclosures.

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