Percutaneous coronary intervention strategies in non-ST segment elevation acute coronary syndrome patients with multivessel coronary artery disease: Systematic review pairwise and network meta-analysis.

BACKGROUND: More than half of NSTEACS patients are presented with multivessel CAD. Culprit vessel only or complete revascularization (CR) guided either by angiography or fractional flow reserve (FFR) is available percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) options. This study aims to compare different PCI strategies in NSTEACS patients with multivessel CAD.

METHODS: Observational and RCTs studies are selected and compared for short- and long-term outcomes of all-cause mortality, MACE, and repeat revascularization. Odds ratio (OR) and SUCRA ranking of 4 interventions; (A) culprit vessel only revascularization, (B) single stage CR guided by angiography, (C) single stage CR guided by FFR, and (D) multistage CR guided by angiography are reported as pairwise and pooled network frequentist analysis conducted using RevMan and R software.

RESULTS: Thirty- six studies with 213,254 patients were included. Pairwise analysis of A vs B shows no significant difference in short term outcomes. Pooled network analysis demonstrates that B, C, and D resulted in a significantly lower odds of long-term all-cause mortality compared to A (OR 0.42-0.77, 95 % CrI: 0.19-0.91). SUCRA ranking shows that C is more favorable compared to other interventions to reduce long term all-cause mortality and MACE (SUCRA 0.932 and 0.953). Sensitivity analysis with only RCTs and propensity matched scoring observational studies retains the significance and ranking of the interventions.

CONCLUSION: CR is just as safe as culprit vessel revascularization and single stage CR guided by FFR is the most preferable strategy to reduce risk of all- cause mortality and MACE.

PROSPERO ID: CRD42023491792.