A novel risk stratification system “Angiographic GRACE Score” for predicting in-hospital mortality of patients with acute myocardial infarction: Data from the K-ACTIVE Registry

Abstract

BackgroundThe Global Registry of Acute Coronary Events (GRACE) score is the most accurate risk assessment system for acute myocardial infarction (AMI), which was proposed in Western countries. However, it is unclear whether GRACE score is applicable to the present Japanese patients with a high prevalence of emergent percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and vasospasm. This study aimed to clarify the usefulness of GRACE risk score for risk stratification of Japanese AMI patients treated with early PCI and to evaluate a novel risk stratification system, “angiographic GRACE score,” which is the GRACE risk score adjusted by the information of the culprit coronary artery and its flow at pre- and post-PCI, to improve its predicting availability. MethodsThe subjects were 1817 AMI patients who underwent PCI within 24 h of onset between October 2015 and August 2017 and were registered in Kanagawa Acute Cardiovascular (K-ACTIVE) Registry via survey form. The association between the clinical parameters and in-hospital mortality was investigated. ResultsA total of 79 (4.3%) in-hospital deaths were identified. The C-statistics for the in-hospital mortality of the GRACE score was 0.86, which was higher than that of the other conventional risk factors, including age (0.65), systolic blood pressure (0.70), heart rate (0.62), Killip classification (0.77), and serum levels of creatinine (0.68) and peak creatine kinase (0.74). The angiographic GRACE score improved the C-statistics from 0.86 of the original GRACE score to 0.89 (p < 0.05). In the setting of the cut-off value at 200, in-hospital mortality in the patients with the angiographic GRACE score <200 was 0.6%, which was relatively lower than those with ≥200, 9.4%. ConclusionsThe GRACE score is a useful predictor of in-hospital mortality among Japanese AMI patients in the PCI era. Moreover, the angiographic GRACE score could improve the predicting availability.