Aortic stenosis (AS) is seen in nearly 3% of all patients presenting with their first ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction (STEMI), according to new findings published in the American Journal of Cardiology. And those patients face a heightened risk of all-cause mortality.
“Little is known about the frequency of concomitant AS during admission for STEMI and the prognostic implications of concomitant AS,” wrote lead author Gurpreet K. Singh, MD, a cardiologist at Leiden University Medical Center in the Netherlands. “The pressure overload imposed on the already compromised left ventricle may facilitate adverse remodeling and heart failure during follow-up.”
The study’s authors tracked data from more than 2,000 STEMI patients treated with primary percutaneous coronary intervention from February 2004 to May 2013. The average patient age was 61 years old, and 76% were male.
The overall prevalence of AS among STEMI patients was 2.7%. This consistently increased with age, however. Just 1% of STEMI patients younger than 65 presented with AS, for instance, but that number was 7% for patients 75 to 84 and 16% for patients 85 years and older.
Patients with AS also had a much higher all-cause mortality rate, though that was not true for patients with aortic valve sclerosis.
“A possible explanation for these results is that AS represents a more advanced stage of the disease, which may have a stronger association with outcome than aortic valve sclerosis,” the authors wrote.
Singh et al. emphasized that STEMI patients presenting with AS require “further follow-up to detect fast progression to severe AS.”
“Future studies are needed to investigate if early intervention is needed in patients with STEMI and concomitant AS,” they concluded.
The full analysis is available here.
Michael has more than 16 years of experience as a professional writer and editor. He has written at length about cardiology, radiology, artificial intelligence and other key healthcare topics.