Bendopnea Predicts High SYNTAX Score in Patients With Coronary Artery Disease: A Bayesian Approach.

Coronary artery disease (CAD) is one of the major health problems worldwide. CAD severity, as calculated by SYNTAX score (SS), is associated with higher morbidity and mortality. A new symptom of shortness of breath within 30 s while bending forward is described as bendopnea and is related to elevated cardiac filling pressure. It is also known that a high SS is associated with left ventricular (LV) dysfunction which leads to higher LV filling pressure. We aimed to investigate whether there was an association between bendopnea and high SS in CAD patients. A high SS was defined ≥22. Of 374 stable angina pectoris patients, 238 (64%) patients had bendopnea and 136 (36%) patients had no bendopnea in this study. The bendopnea (+) group had higher SS and Gensini scores than the bendopnea (-) group (posterior probabilities >0.999 and 0.995, respectively). The presence of bendopnea was independently associated with a higher SS (odds ratio [OR] = 3.82, 95% credible intervals [CrI] = 1.93-8.17). When different priors were used in the context of meta-analysis, there was only 18% heterogeneity among the results, indicating that the results of our study were robust. This is the first study to report that bendopnea was independently associated with CAD severity.