Association Between Perioperative Adverse Cardiac Events and Mortality During One-Year Follow-Up After Noncardiac Surgery

Abstract

Background Cardiac complications are associated with perioperative mortality, but perioperative adverse cardiac events (PACEs) that are associated with long-term mortality have not been clearly defined. We identified PACE as a composite of myocardial infarction, coronary revascularization, congestive heart failure, arrhythmic attack, acute pulmonary embolism, cardiac arrest, or stroke during the 30-day postoperative period and we compared mortality according to PACE occurrence. Methods and Results From January 2011 to June 2019, a total of 203 787 consecutive adult patients underwent noncardiac surgery at our institution. After excluding those with 30-day mortality, mortality during a 1-year follow-up was compared. Machine learning with the extreme gradient boosting algorithm was also used to evaluate whether PACE was associated with 1-year mortality. After excluding 1203 patients with 30-day mortality, 202 584 patients were divided into 7994 (3.9%) patients with PACE and 194 590 (96.1%) without PACE. After an adjustment, the mortality was higher in the PACE group (2.1% versus 7.7%; hazard ratio [HR], 1.90; 95% CI, 1.74-2.09; P<0.001). Results were similar for 7839 pairs of propensity-score-matched patients (4.9% versus 7.9%; HR, 1.64; 95% CI, 1.44-1.87; P<0.001). PACE was significantly associated with mortality in the extreme gradient boostingmodel. Conclusions PACE as a composite outcome was associated with 1-year mortality. Further studies are needed for PACE to be accepted as an end point in clinical studies of noncardiac surgery.