Prognosis of percutaneous coronary intervention and coronary artery bypass grafts for ostial right coronary lesions in propensity-matched individuals.

OBJECTIVE: Our aim was to evaluate the relative safety and efficacy of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with drug-eluting stents (DES) versus coronary artery bypass grafts (CABG) for the treatment of ostial right coronary stenosis (ORCS) lesions.

METHODS: Three hundred fifty-nine cases of ORCS lesion were treated via CABG (n = 232) or PCI (n = 127) procedures. Propensity scores for undergoing the CABG procedure were estimated and used to match 105 pairs of patients between the two groups. Kaplan-Meier major adverse cardiac and cerebrovascular events (MACCE)-free curves were constructed to compare long-term MACCE-free survival between the two groups.

RESULTS: For the 105 propensity-matched pairs, patients were more likely to undergo repeat revascularization with CABG in the PCI group than in the CABG group during the first 30 days (4 cases vs. 0 case, P= 0.043, χ(2) = 4.08) and the 1-year follow-up (5 cases vs. 0 case, P= 0.02, χ(2) = 5.17). With a mean follow-up of 12.04 ± 6.47 months and a total of 210.67 patient-years, the freedom from MACCE in the CABG group was significantly higher than that in the PCI group (Log rank test, χ(2) = 4.48, P= 0.03). There were no significant differences in the rates of death, myocardial infarction, nonfatal stroke, death/myocardium infarction/stroke, or repeated PCI between the two groups during the first 30 days and during the 1-year follow-up period.

CONCLUSION: For OCRS lesions, CABG provided greater protection than PCI procedure in terms of freedom from MACCE, mainly due to the reduced number of repeated revascularization procedures. CABG should be considered as first-choice revascularization strategy for ORCS lesions.