SCOTTSDALE, ARIZ.– Abdominal aortic aneurysm repair in patients 80 years and older can be performed safely and with good medium-term survival rates, a prospective single-site study has shown.
Perioperative mortality in elective and emergent AAA repair for octogenarians was 2% and 35%, respectively, with a median survival rate of 19 months in both groups.
Courtesy Wikimedia Commons/Milorad Dimic, MD/Creative Commons License
According to these data, “Patients shouldn’t be turned down for aneurysm repair on the basis of their age alone,” Dr. Christopher M. Lamb, a vascular surgery fellow at the University of California Davis Medical Center in Sacramento, said during a presentation at this year’s Southern Association for Vascular Surgery annual meeting.
“However, whether we should be doing these procedures is a different question, and I don’t think these data allow us to answer that question properly.”Dr. Lamb and his colleagues reviewed the records of 847 consecutive patients aged 80 years or older, seen between April 2005 and February 2014 for any type of AAA repair. Cases were sorted according to whether they were elective, ruptured, or urgent but unruptured. A total of 226 patients met the study’s age criteria; there were nearly seven men for every woman, all with a median age of 83 years. Of the elective AAA repair arm of the study, 131 patients (116 men) with a median age of 82 years had an endovascular repair, while the rest underwent open surgical repair. The combined 30-day mortality rate for these patients was 2.3%, with no significant difference between either the endovascular aneurysm repair (EVAR) or the open surgical repair (OSR) patients (1.9% vs. 4.2%; P = .458). The median survival of all elective repair patients was 19 months (interquartile range, 10-35), with no difference seen between the two groups (P = .113)Of the 65 patients (53 men) with ruptured AAA, the median age was 83 years. A third had open repair (32.3%), while the rest had EVAR. The combined 30-day mortality rate was 35.4% but was significantly higher after OSR (52.4% vs. 27.3%; P = .048). The median survival rate was 6 months (IQR, 6-42) when 30-day mortality rates were excluded. The median survival rates in patients who lived longer than 30 days was significantly higher in OSR patients (42.5 months vs. 11 months; P = .019).
Of the 23 men and 7 women with symptomatic but unruptured AAA, all but 1 had EVAR. At 30 days, there was one diverticular perforation–related postoperative death in the EVAR group, which had a median survival rate of 29 months. There being only a single patient in the OSR group obviated a comparative median survival rate analysis.
A subanalysis of the final 20 months of the study showed that 41% of octogenarians seeking any type of AAA repair at the site were rejected (48 rejections vs. 69 repairs). Those who were rejected for repair tended to be older, with a median age of 86 years vs. 83 years for patients who underwent repair (P = .0004).
Dr. Lamb noted that although the findings demonstrate acceptable overall safety rates for the entire cohort, without a control group of patients that did not have AAA repair, it would be hard to draw a definite conclusion about the utility of the findings, and that more data were warranted; however, the potential for limited long-term survival with what previous reports have suggested may include “a reduced quality of life for a good part of it, possibly raises the question that these patients should be treated conservatively, more often.”
The rejection rate data prompted the presentation’s discussant, Dr. William D. Jordan Jr., section chief of vascular surgery at the University of Alabama at Birmingham and the presentation’s discussant, to challenge the findings and asked whether a single surgeon selected the patients.
Dr. Samuel R. Money
“You said there is not a selection bias in your study, but I beg to differ. Perhaps all these kinds of studies have a selection bias, and I believe they should. We should select the appropriate patients for the appropriate procedure at the appropriate time, with the appropriate expectation of outcome. Bias in this setting may be seen as good,” Dr. Jordan said.Dr. Lamb responded that the treatment algorithm at the site for all patients with a confirmed AAA of 5.5 cm or greater included CT imaging that is reviewed by a multidisciplinary team comprising vascular surgeons and interventional radiologists, who then evaluated the patients according to their physiology and anatomy, as well as their comorbidities, with the intention that whenever possible, EVAR rather than open repair would be performed.
As to whether there was a bias toward not repairing AAA in older patients, Dr. Lamb said it was incumbent on any health system to evaluate a procedure’s cost-effectiveness, but that, “the life expectancy of a vascular patient is often more limited than I think we’d like to believe … we don’t know what the natural history of these patients’ life expectancy is. We don’t know from these data what the cause of death was, but anecdotally, we didn’t see hundreds of patients return with ruptured aneurysms after an EVAR.”
“I would truly like to see how many [of these patients] who make it out of the hospital return to normal living within 6 months,” Dr. Samuel R. Money, chair of surgery at the Mayo Clinic in Scottsdale, Ariz., said in an interview following the presentation. “At some point, the question becomes ‘Can we afford to spend $100,000 dollars to keep a 90-year-old patient alive for 6 more months?’ Can this society sustain the cost of that?”
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