Impact of prior use of four preventive medications on outcomes in patients hospitalized for acute coronary syndrome- Results from CPACS-2 study

Abstract

© 2016 Li et al. This is an open access article distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original author and source are credited. Background It is widely reported that long-Term use of four preventive medications (antiplatelet agents, angiotensin converting enzyme inhibitor / angiotensin receptor blocker, statin and betablockers) reduce the risk of subsequent acute coronary syndromes (ACS). It is unclear whether these four medications benefit patients who develop ACS despite its use. Methods and Results Logistic regression and propensity-score was applied among 14790 ACS patients to assess the association between prior use of four preventive medications and in-hospital outcomes including severity of disease at presentation (type of ACS, systolic blood pressure <90 mmHg, and heart rate> = 100 beats/min), complicating arrhythmia and major adverse cardiovascular events (MACEs, including all deaths, non-fatal myocardial infarction or reinfarction, and non-fatal stroke). Prior use of each of the four medications was significantly associated with less severity of disease (ORs ranged from 0.40 to 0.82, all P<0.05), less arrhythmia (ORs ranged from 0.45 to 0.64, all P<0.05), and reduced risk of MACEs (ORs ranged from 0.59 to 0.73, all P<0.05) during hospitalization. Multiple variable-Adjusted ORs of MACEs were 0.77, 0.67, 0.48 and 0.59 respectively in patients with 1, 2, 3 and 4 medications in comparison with patients with none, and other clinical outcomes showed the same trend (P for trend < 0.05). Conclusions Among ACS patients in our study, those with prior use of four preventive medications presented with less disease severity, developed less arrhythmia and had a lower risk of inhospital MACEs. The value of taking these medications may beyond just preventing occurrence of the disease.