Long-term outcomes of medical therapy versus successful recanalisation for coronary chronic total occlusions in patients with and without type 2 diabetes mellitus

Abstract

Abstract Background In this study, we compared the outcomes of medical therapy (MT) with successful percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) in chronic total occlusions (CTO) patients with and without type 2 diabetes mellitus. Methods A total of 2015 patients with CTOs were stratified. Diabetic patients (n = 755, 37.5%) and non-diabetic patients (n = 1260, 62.5%) were subjected to medical therapy or successful CTO-PCI. We performed a propensity score matching (PSM) to balance the baseline characteristics. A comparison of the major adverse cardiac events (MACE) was done to evaluate long-term outcomes. Results The median follow-up duration was 2.6 years. Through multivariate analysis, the incidence of MACE was significantly higher among diabetic patients compared to the non-diabetic patients (adjusted hazard ratio [HR] 1.32, 95% confidence interval [CI] 1.09–1.61, p = 0.005). Among the diabetic group, the rate of MACE (adjusted HR 0.61, 95% CI 0.42–0.87, p = 0.006) was significantly lower in the successful CTO-PCI group than in the MT group. Besides, in the non-diabetic group, the prevalence of MACE (adjusted HR 0.85, 95% CI 0.64–1.15, p = 0.294) and cardiac death (adjusted HR 0.94, 95% CI 0.51–1.70, p = 0.825) were comparable between the two groups. Similar results as with the early detection were obtained in propensity-matched diabetic and non-diabetic patients. Notably, there was a significant interaction between diabetic or non-diabetic with the therapeutic strategy on MACE (p for interaction = 0.036). Conclusions For treatment of CTO, successful CTO-PCI highly reduces the risk of MACE in diabetic patients when compared with medical therapy. However, this does not apply to non-diabetic patients.