TUESDAY, June 10 (HealthDay News) -- After adjusting for risk, men and women have similar mortality rates following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI), with overall mortality declining in the past 25 years, particularly for women, researchers report in the June 17 issue of the Journal of the American College of Cardiology.
Mandeep Singh, M.D., of the Mayo Clinic in Rochester, Minn., and colleagues conducted a retrospective, cohort study of 18,885 patients who underwent PCIs between 1979 and 1995 and between 1996 and 2004. The division was necessary because of significant changes in coronary artery disease treatment protocols starting around 1996.
Overall, PCI was successful in 89 percent of women and 90 percent of men, although women in the study were older than the men and more likely to have diabetes, hypertension or hypercholesterolemia, the researchers note. In the recent group, 30-day mortality was lower than that of the early group in women (2.9 percent versus 4.4 percent) and men (2.2 percent versus 2.8 percent), the investigators found. Long-term survival was similar for both genders in both groups. After adjusting for risk factors, there was no difference between men and women from 1994 onward for either 30-day or long-term mortality.
In an accompanying editorial, Robert F. Wilson, M.D., and Ganesh Raveendran, M.D., of the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, focused on the disparity in improved outcomes between men and women: "Men appear to be beneficiaries of the same treatment, yet their mortality has not changed as much" as women's, suggesting a need to research overtreatment in men.
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