Prognostic Assessment of Fractional Flow Reserve in Different Strata in Patients with Coronary Artery Disease

There are limited real-world data on the clinical course of untreated coronary lesions according to their functional severity.

To evaluate the 5-year clinical outcomes of patients with revascularized lesions with fractional flow reserve (FFR) ≤ 0.8 and patients with non-revascularized lesions with FFR > 0.8.

The FFR assessment was performed in 218 patients followed for up to 5 years. Participants were classified based on FFR into ischemia group (≤ 0.8, intervention group, n = 55), low-normal FFR group (> 0.8-0.9, n = 91), and high-normal FFR group (> 0.9, n = 72). The primary endpoint was major adverse cardiac events (MACEs), a composite of death, myocardial infarction, and need for repeat revascularization. The significance level was set at 0.05; therefore, results with a p-value < 0.05 were considered statistically significant.

Most patients were male (62.8%) with a mean age of 64.1 years. Diabetes was present in 27%. On coronary angiography, the severity of stenosis was 62% in the ischemia group, 56.4% in the low-normal FFR group, and 54.3% in the high-normal FFR group (p<0.05). Mean follow-up was 3.5 years. The incidence of MACEs was 25.5%, 13.2%, and 11.1%, respectively (p=0.037). MACE incidence did not differ significantly between the low-normal and high-normal FFR groups.

Patients with FFR indicative of ischemia had poorer outcomes than those in non-ischemia groups. There was no difference in the incidence of events between the low-normal and high-normal FFR groups. Long-term studies with a large sample size are needed to better assess cardiovascular outcomes in patients with moderate coronary stenosis with FFR values between 0.8 and 1.0.