Women still at higher risk for adverse outcomes after coronary artery bypass graft surgery

Women have a significantly higher risk for adverse outcomes following coronary artery bypass graft surgery, with no significant change in risk from 2011 to 2020, according to a study published online March 1 in JAMA Surgery.

Mario Gaudino, M.D., Ph.D., from Weill Cornell Medicine in New York City, and colleagues conducted a retrospective cohort study involving 1,297,204 patients (24.5 percent women) who underwent primary isolated coronary artery bypass from 2011 to 2020 to evaluate trends in outcomes of women.

The researchers found that compared with men, women had higher unadjusted operative mortality (2.8 versus 1.7 percent) and overall unadjusted incidence of the composite of operative mortality and morbidity (22.9 versus 16.7 percent). From 2011 to 2020, the attributable risk of female sex for operative mortality varied from 1.28 to 1.41. For the composite of operative mortality and morbidity, the attributable risk of female sex was 1.08 in both 2011 and 2020.

"We found that women had higher risk of operative mortality and postoperative complications after CABG compared with men and that the excess risk in women was essentially unchanged over the last decade," the authors write. "We did not observe a significant decrease in the operative risk for women undergoing CABG in the United States between 2011 and 2020."

One author disclosed financial ties to the medical device industry.

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