A recent study finds that women undergoing TEVAR experience worse outcomes and that gender should be considered in an analysis of risk versus benefit.
"Female patients have higher mortality than male patients after TEVAR in a real-world population, even after adjusting for their older age and increased medical comorbidities," said Dr. Sarah Deery of Beth Israel Deaconess Medical Center in Boston. She was part of a multi-institutional team that evaluated Vascular Quality Initiative data collected on 2,574 patients undergoing TEVAR for intact descending thoracic aortic aneurysm.
Results, published in the July edition of the Journal of Vascular Surgery, found that, after adjusting for age, aortic size index, symptoms, and co-morbidity, female gender remained independently predictive of both short- and long-term mortality.
Women on average have smaller blood vessels than men, including the aorta and iliac arteries. Researchers have studied the higher mortality rates for women in AAA repair; a less well-studied phenomenon exists in the care of thoracic aneurysms. Access vessel size becomes even more important as TEVAR devices have larger diameters than those used in infrarenal EVAR.
"Further research into the cause of these sex differences will allow us to determine the optimal threshold for repair of thoracic aortic aneurysms in female patients," Dr. Deery said.
To read the article (open source through Aug. 30) visit vsweb.org/JVS-TEVAR.