[Median-term clinical development of patients with nonsurgical triple coronary vessel disease]

Patients with angiographic non-surgical triple vessel coronary artery disease are usually considered to have a poor prognosis. We studied the evolution of 110 consecutive patients (mean age of 54.8 years) who underwent coronary angiography between April 1979 and March 1983 and followed up for an average of 24 months after the investigation. There were 10 deaths during the study period, all of "cardiac" causes (5 sudden deaths, 1 cardiac failure and 4 myocardial infarctions). Ninety nine of the 100 survivors at the time the study was closed had a medical treatment (nitrate derivatives, beta-blockers, calcium antagonists, usually associated). The actuarial survival was 94 +/- 2.2% at one year, 87.3 +/- 3.5% at 4 years. The quality of life expressed in terms of angina and breathlessness was good on the whole, as only 16 and 10 patients respectively had Grade III angina and dyspnea at the end of the study. Lack of resources and a follow-up period which was too short to assess the mortality rate meant that we were unable to analyse the factors which influenced the prognosis in this group of patients. These results support those of recent studies showing a mortality rate of patients with angiographic non-surgical triple vessel coronary artery disease that does not exceed 3 to 4% per year; these results seem to have improved over the last twenty years.