ACC, STS awarded $4M grant to comparatively study PCI vs. CABG
The National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute of the National Institutes of Health has awarded a $4 million grant to the American College of Cardiology (ACC) and the  Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) to study the comparative effectiveness of PCI compared with coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) surgery.

By linking the ACC, STS and the Centers for Medicare & Medicaid Services’ MEDPAR databases, the study will seek to help physicians make better decisions and improve healthcare for patients with coronary artery disease.

William Weintraub, MD, the study’s principal investigator and chair of the ACC’s National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) CathPCI Registry Steering Committee, said, that there “remains considerable uncertainty about the best strategy between catheter-based and surgery-based approaches in patients requiring revascularization for coronary artery disease.... By having available to us combined databases of over 10 million people, we will also be able to address concerns about choice in critical subgroups such as patients with other severe diseases and the elderly. This grant will offer a model for how to pursue comparative effectiveness research using large clinical databases."

The Duke Clinical Research Institute will perform the analysis for clinical outcomes and Christiana Care Center for Outcomes Research will perform the analysis for economic outcomes. Also, PERFUSE Angiographic Core Laboratories and Data Coordination Center will be performing detailed angiographic analysis on 2,000 angiograms of patients undergoing PCI in order to determine their SYNTAX score.

The $4 million award has been issued under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act (ARRA) of 2009 and covers a two-year period of the study.

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