THURSDAY, March 27 (HealthDay News) -- In patients who undergo coronary stenting, early exercise stress testing may provide significant prognostic information, according to the results of a study published in the March 15 issue of the American Journal of Cardiology.
Peter Wenaweser, M.D., of University Hospital Bern in Switzerland, and colleagues studied 446 patients who underwent exercise stress testing the day after the intervention.
After a median follow-up of 41 months, the researchers found that overall mortality was significantly higher in patients with positive exercise stress test results than in those with normal results (9.3 percent versus 3.9 percent). They also found that patients with positive stress test results had higher rates of major adverse cardiac events (45.4 percent versus 35.4 percent) and cardiac mortality (4.1 percent versus 1.1. percent). They observed the highest risk for major adverse cardiac events in patients who had positive stress test results and incomplete revascularization (47.1 percent versus 33.3 percent for patients with normal stress test results and complete revascularization).
"Early exercise stress testing might therefore serve as a tool to assess borderline lesions left untreated after the initial revascularization procedure and determine the need for a repeat revascularization procedure," the authors write. "Our findings may serve as the initiation of a larger trial evaluating differences in mortality according to predefined revascularization and treatment strategies."
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