Background: The decision-making factors and long-term clinical outcomes between PCI and CABG in left main (LM) disease are still not well defined in the real world.
Methods: We evaluated consecutive patients (n = 230) with LM disease either treated by PCI (n = 118) or CABG (n = 112). The primary endpoint was major adverse cardiovascular events (MACE), defined as a composite of cardiac death, spontaneous myocardial infarction (MI), stroke, and target vessel revascularization (TVR) for 7 years.
Results: In the multivariate-adjusted analysis, the presence of intermediate EuroSCORE II and high SYNTAX scores predisposed to CABG. Isolated LM disease was associated with receiving PCI. The PCI group had a similar rate of MACE (HRadj 0.97, 95% CI [0.48-1.94], p = 0.92) and a lower tendency of hard MACE (HRadj 0.49, 95% CI [0.22-1.07], p = 0.07) compared to the CABG group, mainly due to the balance between a higher rate of TVR (HRadj 9.71, p = 0.02) and a lower rate of stroke (HRadj 0.22, p = 0.09) with the PCI group than in the CABG group.
Conclusions: The decision making of treatment strategy was made based on clinical and angiographic factors. The selected patients who received PCI showed similar MACE and trend of a lower rate of composite hard endpoints despite multivariate adjustment.
Keywords: coronary artery bypass surgery; decision making; left main disease; long-term outcomes; percutaneous coronary intervention; real world.