Long-Term Benefits and Limitations of Combined Antianginal Drug Therapy in Elderly Patients with Symptomatic Chronic Coronary Artery Disease
Bibliographic record
Abstract
BACKGROUND: Chronic angina is a common and disabling disorder in the elderly. Combined antianginal drug treatment represents the mainstay of therapy in this population. However, there is a paucity of data regarding the effect of this strategy on long-term outcome in the elderly. METHODS: To assess the long-term effect of combined antianginal drug therapy in elderly individuals, we performed a long-term follow-up analysis of all 148 patients of the Trial of Invasive versus Medical therapy in Elderly (TIME) patients with chronic symptomatic coronary-artery disease assigned to an optimized medical therapy strategy. Angina severity, measures of quality of life (QOL), and survival were assessed after a median of 3.7 (0.1-6.9) years. RESULTS: At baseline, patients were 79.8 +/- 3.5 years old with Canadian Cardiovascular Society (CCS) class angina 3.0 +/- 0.7 despite the use of 2.4 +/- 0.6 antianginal drugs. Although antianginal drugs were increased to 2.8 +/- 0.9 (P < .01), 63 (43%) patients needed revascularization for refractory symptoms during the first year of observation (REVASC). At baseline, REVASC patients had more frequently CCS class 4 angina (37% vs 20%, P < 0.05) but reported less prior heart failure (5% vs 20%, P < 0.01), fewer prior cerebral events (3% vs 13%, P < .05) and a lower rate of two or more comorbidities (10% vs 33%, P < .01) than patients on continued drug therapy (DRUG). At long-term follow-up, angina severity was still higher in DRUG compared to REVASC patients (CCS class, 1.8 +/- 1.6 vs 1.0 +/- 1.4, P < .05) despite more antianginal drugs (2.1 +/- 1.1 vs 1.5 +/- 1.0, P < .01), whereas measures of QOL had improved similarly in both groups. In addition, long-term mortality was significantly higher in DRUG than in REVASC patients (38% vs 13%, P < .01). CONCLUSION: Combined antianginal drug therapy successfully relieved symptoms in most elderly patients with chronic angina but failed to do so in 43%. Patients who needed revascularization for refractory symptoms reported less angina, despite lower drug use during long-term follow-up and had a better long-term survival. Thus, the widely used strategy to increase antianginal drug therapy in elderly patients instead of evaluating them for revascularization should be reconsidered.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.004 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Open science | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".