Coronary Artery Bypass Grafts or Percutaneous Coronary Intervention for High Risk Patients

Overview

Most patients with Left Ventricular Systolic Dysfunction (LVSD) or heart failure (HF) have coronary artery disease (CAD) while some patients also have renal disease. Life-saving revascularization is underperformed in patients with LVSD or HF due to CAD, and especially if there is concomitant renal disease. We hypothesize that PCI will be non-inferior to CABG for all-cause mortality and recurrent myocardial infarction (MI), stroke or hospitalization for HF. To compare revascularization by PCI versus by CABG, we will perform a multicentre, open-label, parallel, randomized, controlled trial in patients with severe CAD who belong to defined categories of moderate-to-high risk characteristics, where guidelines acknowledge that both PCI and CABG are relevant treatment options.

The STICH trial demonstrated a reduction in overall mortality after 10 years, but the 5-year analyses did not show significant benefits of CABG versus medical therapy. The extension of the STICH study, the STICHES study established the superiority of CABG over medical therapy for all-cause mortality (58.9% versus 66.1%; HR 0.84, 95%CI: 0.73-0.97; p = 0.02) over 9.8 years. Thus, these studies suggest that to offset the early operative risks of CABG, 10-year survival is needed. As many patients with HF and/or LVSD are elderly, both clinicians and patients are often unwilling to accept increased short-term risk even if they might eventually achieve long-term benefit, and thus not favour CABG. The available evidence suggest that PCI is feasible for patients with ischemic LVSD, and that PCI may yield long-term mortality rates like CABG with lower short-term morbidity The planned trial is a multicentre, open-label, parallel, randomized, controlled trial comparing revascularization by CABG versus by PCI in patients with severe CAD and at high risk, where guidelines accept both CABG and PCI as suitableand mortality. High risk is defined as patients with LVEF \<45%, (irrespectively of clinical HF and severe renal disease), left anterior descending (LAD) disease in one- or two vessel disease, three-vessel disease with a SYNTAX score of up to 22 and left main disease with a SYNTAX score of up to 32. The trial is powered for non-inferiorty.