A Predictable Propensity : Secondary Revascularization is Associated With Further Revascularization

T he epidemiologic burden of peripheral artery disease (PAD) is remarkable with prevalence ranging from 3% to 10%, rising to 15% to 20% in patients over 70 years. Symptomatic PAD with intermittent claudication has a prevalence of up to 60% in patients over 60 years of age and the largest prospective study demonstrates an incidence of critical limb ischemia of 220 cases per 1 million population. Yet, as our awareness of this disease has grown, so too have the treatment strategies combatting it. Lower extremity bypass techniques and peripheral vascular intervention strategies have developed over time. The progress of medical therapies and the increasingly recognized importance of supervised exercise as well as ancillary wound healing techniques have allowed the clinical treatment of PAD to grow more and more sophisticated. As more tools have become available, more complex questions have arisen regarding how to optimize the treatment of PAD. After much work, multiple national and society guidelines were established to outline interventions that target PAD. The TASC (Trans-Atlantic Inter-Society Consensus Document on Management of Peripheral Arterial Disease) morphological stratification of iliac and femoropopliteal lesions were implemented to guide choice of endovascular versus surgical intervention in patients with lower extremity vascular disease. The CLEVER trial (CLaudication: Exercise Versus Endoluminal Revascularization) touted the benefits of supervised exercise even compared to peripheral vascular intervention with stenting (though without concurrent exercise therapy). The recent ERASE trial (Endovascular Revascularization and Supervised Exercise) built upon these findings, demonstrating greater improvements in maximum walking distance and quality of life for peripheral vascular intervention plus exercise compared with exercise therapy alone. With regards to critical limb ischemia, the Bypass Versus Angioplasty in Severe Ischemia of the Leg (BASIL) trial published in 2005 regarding patients treated between 1999 and 2004 found less short-term morbidity with peripheral vascular intervention, but further analysis also demonstrated that lower extremity bypass was associated with a decreased mortality (hazard ratio [HR] 0.61 95% CI 0.50 to 0.75) compared to balloon angioplasty alone. This led to the American College of Cardiology and the American Heart Association (ACC/AHA) recommendation that primary lower extremity bypass is reasonable in critical limb ischemia patients with life expectancy of greater than 2 years. However, the significantly less invasive nature of endovascular intervention as well as the development of peripheral vascular intervention to include primary stenting has led many to adopt a peripheral vascular intervention-first strategy for most patients with significant lower extremity PAD. Yet with every question answered novel questions have arisen. This is particularly true regarding important clinical decisions in the subgroup that has failed initial attempts at revascularization and requires further evaluation and treatment. In this issue of JAHA, Jones and colleagues develop a propensity analysis targeting the question of whether first treatment failure with peripheral vascular intervention or lower extremity bypass impacts the success of subsequent revascularization with lower extremity bypass. This examination of the impact of the distinct stages of clinical care is extremely important because management of both intermittent claudication and critical limb ischemia does not end with a first intervention. PAD and its various subtypes are chronic diseases that require life-long clinical care and have proven to often require multiple either staged or unforeseen interventions. The authors conclude that in both crude and propensityweighted analyses, secondary lower extremity bypass was associated with significantly inferior 1-year outcomes, including major adverse limb event-free survival and reintervention or amputation-free survival. They also note that inferior outcomes for secondary lower extremity bypass were The opinions expressed in this article are not necessarily those of the editors or of the American Heart Association. From the Department of Cardiovascular Medicine, Heart & Vascular Institute, Cleveland Clinic, Cleveland, OH. Correspondence to: Mehdi H. Shishehbor, DO, MPH, PhD, Heart & Vascular Institute, Cleveland Clinic, 9500 Euclid Avenue, J3-05, Cleveland, OH 44195. E-mail: [email protected] J Am Heart Assoc. 2013;2:e000655 doi: 10.1161/JAHA.113.000655. a 2013 The Authors. Published on behalf of the American Heart Association, Inc., by Wiley Blackwell. This is an open access article under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial License, which permits use, distribution and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited and is not used for commercial purposes.