Angiography After Cardiac Arrest

This is the worst sort of paper – nuggets of truth mired in systematic flaws.  There’s certainly no ill intent by the authors to mislead, it’s simply the nature of this sort of retrospective review.

The PROCAT consortium has been publishing studies of their post-arrest protocols for several years.  They’re huge proponents of early coronary angiography following resuscitation for out-of-hospital arrest – and this is another in a string of articles demonstrating that patients going to coronary angiography after out-of-hospital arrest have improved outcomes.  Of the 1274 patients in their cohort, 745 received early coronary angiography, 447 identified a culprit lesion, and 347 underwent PCI.  The survival rate was 46% in patients undergoing PCI.

However, this number is conflated by other confounding variables known to be associated with good outcomes following cardiac arrest – coronary lesions are likely to be associated with VT/VF, which were also associated with good outcomes.  Additionally, significantly more survivors received therapeutic hypothermia than non-survivors, illustrating the massive problem with viewing this sort of report with anything other than reasoned curiosity: rampant selection bias.  Patients survived because they were selected for interventions based on individualized prognostic features, treatments were not applied evenly across the population.

There is absolutely a subset of OHCA that benefits from early coronary angiography – but this benefit should not be generalized to the inappropriate allocation of resources associated with taking all OHCA to the cath lab after resuscitation.

“Benefit of an early and systematic imaging procedure after cardiac arrest: Insights