Addition of frailty and disability to cardiac surgery risk scores identifies elderly patients at high risk of mortality or major morbidity.

Background- Cardiac surgery risk scores perform poorly in elderly patients, in part because they do not take into account frailty and disability which are critical determinants of health status with advanced age. There is an unmet need to combine established cardiac surgery risk scores with measures of frailty and disability to provide a more complete model for risk prediction in elderly patients undergoing cardiac surgery. Methods and Results- This was a prospective, multicenter cohort study of elderly patients (≥70 years) undergoing coronary artery bypass and/or valve surgery in the United States and Canada. Four different frailty scales, 3 disability scales, and 5 cardiac surgery risk scores were measured in all patients. The primary outcome was the STS composite end point of in-hospital postoperative mortality or major morbidity. A total of 152 patients were enrolled, with a mean age of 75.9±4.4 years and 34% women. Depending on the scale used, 20-46% of patients were found to be frail, and 5-76% were found to have at least 1 disability. The most predictive scale in each domain was: 5-meter gait speed ≥6 seconds as a measure of frailty (odds ratio [OR], 2.63; 95% confidence interval [CI], 1.17-5.90), ≥3 impairments in the Nagi scale as a measure of disability (OR, 2.98; 95% CI, 1.35-6.56) and either the Parsonnet score (OR, 1.08; 95% CI, 1.04-1.13) or Society of Thoracic Surgeons Predicted Risk of Mortality or Major Morbidity (STS-PROMM) (OR, 1.05; 95% CI, 1.01-1.09) as a cardiac surgery risk score. Compared with the Parsonnet score or STS-PROMM alone, (area under the curve, 0.68-0.72), addition of frailty and disability provided incremental value and improved model discrimination (area under the curve, 0.73-0.76). Conclusions- Clinicians should use an integrative approach combining frailty, disability, and risk scores to better characterize elderly patients referred for cardiac surgery and identify those that are at increased risk.

Off-pump vs. on-pump coronary artery bypass surgery: an updated meta-analysis and meta-regression of randomized trials.

AIMS: The benefits of off-pump coronary artery bypass (OPCAB) continue to be debated, in part due to the fact that pooled effects fail to consider differences in trial and patient characteristics. We sought to analyse the contemporary evidence for OPCAB vs. conventional coronary artery bypass (CCAB), incorporating recent larger trials, and adjusting for differences in trials using a technique known as meta-regression. METHODS AND RESULTS: We systematically reviewed MEDLINE, EMBASE, and the Cochrane database for published and unpublished randomized trials of OPCAB vs. CCAB in which 30-day or in-hospital clinical outcomes were reported. The outcomes of interest were: all-cause mortality, stroke, and myocardial infarction. In addition to measuring the pooled treatment effects using a random effects meta-analysis model, we measured the effect of selected trial-level factors on the effects observed using the meta-regression technique. Fifty-nine trials were included, encompassing 8961 patients with a mean age of 63.4 and 16% females. There was a significant 30% reduction in the occurrence of post-operative stroke with OPCAB [risk ratio (RR) 0.70, 95% CI: 0.49-0.99]. There was no significant difference in mortality (RR: 0.90, 95% CI: 0.63-1.30) or myocardial infarction (pooled RR: 0.89, 95% CI: 0.69-1.13). In the meta-regression analysis, the effect of OPCAB on all of the clinical outcomes was similar regardless of mean age, proportion of females in the trial, number of grafts per patient, and trial publication date. CONCLUSION: Our meta-analysis incorporating recent trials suggests that there appears to be a beneficial effect of OPCAB on stroke. Moreover, our meta-regression does not support the hypothesis that differences in study populations are responsible for the observed outcomes, although pooled individual patient-data would be better suited to confirm these findings.