Dec 2, 2019
Dr Carolyn Lam: Welcome to Circulation on the Run, your weekly podcast summary and backstage pass to the journal and its editors. I'm Dr Carolyn Lam, associate editor from the National Heart Center and Duke National University of Singapore.
Dr Greg Hundley: And I'm Dr Greg Hundley, associate editor from the Pauley Heart Center in Richmond, Virginia, from VCU Health.
Dr Carolyn Lam: You know what, Greg, I may have a hoarse voice today and I'm a little bit scratchy, but my goodness, I couldn't be more excited about this issue. It's the TCT issue.
Dr Greg Hundley: Well Carolyn, I cannot wait to discuss with our listeners the feature article that compares Apixaban and a P2Y12 inhibitor without Aspirin, versus regimens with Aspirin in patients with AFib who have ACS, whether managed medically or with PCI, or also those undergoing elective PCI that experience regimens that include vitamin K antagonists, aspirin, or both, but more to come later. Carolyn, should I start with my first discussion article and we grab a cup of coffee?
Dr Carolyn Lam: You bet, Greg.
Dr Greg Hundley: So my first article is from Seung-Jung Park from the Asan Medical Center at the University of Ulsan College of Medicine. So Carolyn, here's our first quiz question. In terms of Ticagrelor, have studies been performed in those from Asia evaluating bleeding risk?
Dr Carolyn Lam: You know, I have to admit, Greg, I'm not totally familiar with the literature, but I do know that it's a very important question for us practicing in Asia. We have a perception that the bleeding risk, especially intracranial bleeding, may be higher in Asians.
Dr Greg Hundley: Absolutely. Well, in this multicenter trial, 800 Korean patients hospitalized for acute coronary syndromes with or without ST elevation, and intended for invasive management, were randomly assigned to receive in a one to one ratio, Ticagrelor with a 180 milligram loading dose, and then 90 milligrams twice daily, or Clopidogrel with a 600 milligram loading dose and 75 milligrams daily thereafter, and the primary safety outcome was clinically significant bleeding, which was a composite of major bleeding or minor bleeding according to the PLATO outcomes criteria at 12 months.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Oh, so what did they find?
Dr Greg Hundley: Well Carolyn, at 12 months, the incidence of clinically significant bleeding was higher in the Ticagrelor group than in the Clopidogrel group. So it was 11.7% versus 5.3, and that included major bleeding and fatal bleeding. They were also higher in the Ticagrelor group. The incidents of death from cardiovascular causes, myocardial infarction or stroke, was not significantly different between the Ticagrelor group and the Clopidogrel group, although there was a strong trend toward a higher incidence in the Ticagrelor group with a P value of 0.07. So consequently, Carolyn, these results identified safety concerns regarding bleeding complications of standard dose Ticagrelor in East Asian, Korean patients with acute coronary syndromes, and therefore large adequately powered randomized trials are needed to determine the optimal antithrombotic regimen in this patient population.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Very important data for our patients, as is this next paper, which really examines the cost effectiveness of transcatheter mitral valve repair versus medical therapy in patients with heart failure and secondary mitral regurgitation. Now, these are results from the COAPT trial. As a reminder, the COAPT trial demonstrated that edge-to-edge transcatheter mitral valve repair using the MitraClip resulted in reduced mortality and heart failure hospitalizations and improved quality of life when compared with maximally tolerated guideline directed medical therapy in patients with heart failure and three to four plus secondary mitral regurgitation.
In the current paper, first author Dr Baron from Lahey Hospital and Medical Center in Burlington, Massachusetts and St. Luke’s Mid America Heart Institute in Kansas City, as well as corresponding author Dr Cohen from University of Missouri, Kansas City, and their colleagues used data from the COAPT trial to perform a formal patient level economic analysis of the COAPT from the perspective of the US healthcare system, and they found that although the follow up costs were lower with the MitraClip compared with guideline directed medical therapy, and lower by more than $11,000 per patient. However, the cumulative two year costs remain higher by about $35,000 per patient with the transcatheter mitral valve repair, and this is all due to the upfront costs of the index procedure. Now when in trial survival, health, utilities, and costs were modeled over a lifetime horizon, transcatheter mitral valve repair was projected to increase life expectancy by 1.13 years, and quality adjusted life years, or QALYs, by 0.82 years at a cost of $45,648, yielding a lifetime incremental cost effectiveness ratio, or ICER, of $40,361 per life year gained, and $55,600 per QALY gained.
Dr Greg Hundley: Very interesting. So how do we interpret these results for clinical practice?
Dr Carolyn Lam: Ah, good question. So in order to place this in context, perhaps the most comparable case is the use of transcatheter aortic valve replacement, or TAVR. So based on the partner 1B trial, the ICER for TAVR, compared to medical therapy, was $61,889 per QALY gains. So this is very similar to what you just heard as the ICER for the transcatheter mitral valve repair. The cost effectiveness is also comparable for other commonly used treatments such as the implantable cardiac defibrillators for biventricular pacing, and was interestingly substantially more than the cost effectiveness of continuous flow LVADs, for example, and this is really discussed in a beautiful editorial by Dr Bonow, Mark, and O'Gara, and in this editorial, I think it's really important that they say the cost effectiveness projections really need to be placed in the context of continuing uncertainties regarding the interpretation of COAPT compared to that of the MITRA-FR trial, which reported no benefit of transcatheter mitral valve replacement compared to medical therapy, and so they warn that the current cost effectiveness analysis is not a carte blanche for interventional cardiologists to dramatically escalate their use of MitraClip procedure, and the data do support the thoughtful and deliberate use of this potentially life lengthening procedure in carefully selected patients and under very careful circumstances. You've got to read their editorial.
Dr Greg Hundley: That sounds excellent, Carolyn. I really like that, putting that editorial that puts that data in perspective. Well, my next study really emanates from the ABSORB III trial, and it's from Dr Dean Kereiakes at the Christ Hospital Heart and Vascular Center. The manuscript addresses the long-term cardiovascular event rates among bioresorbable vascular scaffolds and drug eluting metallic stents.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Greg, remind me, what were the results of the original ABSORB trial?
Dr Greg Hundley: Right, Carolyn. So the ABSORB III trial demonstrated non-inferior rates of target lesion failure, cardiac death, target vessel myocardial infarction, or ischemia driven target lesion revascularization at one year with the bioresorbable vascular scaffolds compared with cobalt chromium everolimus-eluting stents, but between one year and three years, and therefore the cumulative to 3 year time point, the adverse event rates, particularly for target vessel myocardial infarction and scaffold thrombosis, were increased with this bioresorbable vascular scaffold.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Ah, I see. Okay, so this current study evaluated the outcomes from three to five years beyond the implantation?
Dr Greg Hundley: Exactly. So what this study did is they looked at an interval of time between three and five years out, and they found reductions in the relative hazards for the bioresorbable vascular scaffolds compared to the common coated stents, and that particularly occurred for target lesion failure, either cardiac death or target vessel MI or ischemia driven target revascularization when compared to the earlier zero to three year time period. So therefore Carolyn, the authors conclude that improved scaffold design and development techniques to mitigate that zero to three year bio resorbable vascular scaffold risk may enhance the late benefits that one sees in this three to five year time point, because of the complete bioresorption.
Dr Carolyn Lam: So that's interesting Greg. Well, my next paper is kind of related. It is the first report of a randomized comparison between magnesium based bioresorbable scaffold and sirolimus-eluting stent in this clinical setting of STEMI with one year clinical and angiographic follow-up. So this study is from the Spanish group, Dr Sabaté and colleagues from the Interventional Cardiology Department and Cardiovascular Institute in Barcelona in Spain, and they found that at one year when compared to the sirolimus-eluting stent, the magnesium based bioresorbable scaffold demonstrated a higher capacity of vasal motor response to pharmacological agents, either endothelium, independent or dependent, at one year. However, the magnesium based bioresorbable scaffolds were also associated with a lower angiographic efficacy, a higher rate of target lesion revascularization, but without thrombotic safety concerns.
Dr Greg Hundley: Wow, Carolyn, very interesting, and Dr Lorenz Räber and Yasushi Ueki wrote a very nice editorial on this whole topic of bioresorbable scaffolds, and they wonder about some of the unfulfilled prophecies. Great for our readers to put these two articles together. Now, how about in that mailbox, Carolyn? What have you got in there?
Dr Carolyn Lam: First there's a research letter by Dr Kimura entitled Very Short Dual Antiplatelet Therapy After Drug-eluting Stent Implantation in Patients with High Bleeding Risk, and that's insights from the STOPDAPT-2 trial. There's another research letter by Dr Lopes entitled The Hospitalization Among Patients with Atrial Fibrillation and a Recent Acute Coronary Syndrome, or PCI, Treated with Apixaban or Aspirin, and that's insights from the AUGUSTUS trial. A very interesting perspective piece by Dr Rob Califf entitled The Balanced Dysfunction in the Health Care Ecosystem Harms Patients, a really, really interesting read, especially those working in the U.S. healthcare system. An ECG challenge deals with fast and slow, long and shorter. I would love to give you a clue to what it is. It's got to do with the atrial ventricular nodes, but I'll let you take a look and test yourself. There’re highlights from the TCT by Drs Giustino, Leon, and Greg Stone, and finally there's Highlights from the Circulation Family of Journals by Sara O'Brien.
Dr Greg Hundley: Very nice, Carolyn. Well, I've got just a couple reviews. Richard Whitlock in a primer provides a nice historical review of anticoagulation for mechanical valves. How do we get here in anticoagulating this particular patient population? Next, Dr Mark Brzezinski from Brigham Women's Hospital in the Harvard Medical School in an on my mind piece provides very elegant figures, beautiful figures, demonstrating inadequate angiogenesis within the fibrous cap of atherosclerotic plaques, and indicates this could be a source or thought of as a contributing factor toward plaque rupture. What an issue, and I can't wait to get onto that featured discussion.
Dr Carolyn Lam: For our featured discussion today, it is a super-hot topic, and a question that comes up again and again in clinical practice. What is the right antithrombotic therapy in patients with atrial fibrillation and acute coronary syndrome, not just those treated with PCI, but also in those treated medically? Well guess what? We're going to have answers right here. I'm so pleased to have with us Dr Renato Lopes, who's a corresponding author from Duke Clinical Research Institute and our associate editor, Dr Stefan James from Uppsala University in Sweden. Wow. Very, very important question here. Renato, could you just start by outlining what is the AUGUSTUS trial?
Dr Renato Lopes: The AUGUSTUS trial was basically one of the four trials trying to give an answer, or help answering about the antithrombotic therapy in patients with anti fibrillation and/or NACS and/or PCI. So in other words, this combination of patients undergoing PCI who require antiplatelet therapy and also patients with AFib who requires anticoagulation therapy, and in summary, what the AUGUSTUS trial did was randomize patients to Apixaban versus VKA, or aspirin placebo in a double blind fashion, and this was a two by two factorial design. So these were basically the two questions that we wanted to answer. Is Apixaban better than VKA, and is it safe to drop aspirin from this treatment strategy? Remembering that everybody received a P2Y12 inhibitor for at least eight months. So this was basically the design of the AUGUSTUS trial, trying to answer two questions in the same study, a two by two factorial design.
Dr Greg Hundley: Very, very nice. And Renato, if I could, I mean I said it in the intro, but may I make sure I got it right. This is the only trial in the field that included patients with ACS that was managed medically. So that's a very important group of patients that we still don't know what the best regimen is, is that right?
Dr Renato Lopes: That is correct. The other trials, the PIONEER, the RE-DUAL PCI and the VPCI, they only included patients undergoing PCI, and when we designed the trial, we thought that it would be important to also include the whole spectrum of ACS, including not only the PCI treated patients, but also the medically managed patients.
Dr Greg Hundley: Well, super. So could you tell us now what were the results?
Dr Renato Lopes: So first, in terms of the breakdown, we found that the breakdown of the PCI, ACS versus elective PCI, was really nice. We had about 60% of the trial being ACS patients, and about 39%-40% elective PCI, and then within the PCI, I think that our results pretty much reflect practice in a lot of parts of the world, which was about 39% medically managed and about 61% PCI treated patients. So to begin with, I think a very nice breakdown that gives us power to look at these three separate groups: ACS medically managed, ACS PCI treated, and also elective PCI, which allows us to understand the whole spectrum of coronary disease in patients also with AFib, and in summary, what we showed for the primary endpoint, which was clinical major or relevant non-major bleeding. Let's start with the Apixaban versus VKA comparison, and we show that Apixaban was safer than VKA in all three groups, in the ACS medically managed, in the PCI treated patients, and also in the elective PCI patients.
There was no significant direction for those three subgroups, although it was borderline 0.052, just showing maybe a little bit less pronounced results in the elective PCI group, but nonetheless, I would say that in general, very consistent, and in terms of Aspirin for the primary endpoint, also no difference, no interaction among those three groups. In other words, as we increase substantially the risk of bleeding about two folds in all the three groups, ACS medically managed, PCI treated patients, and elective PCI patients, with about again, two fold increase in bleeding compared to placebo. If we go to ischemic events, again, that's our hospitalization and other that are ischemic events. In terms of Apixaban versus VKA, the results were very consistent with the overall trial among these three groups, and in terms of as ACS versus placebo, the results also for the ischemic events were also similar among the three groups. So again, reassuring that the main results of the trial were very consistent, regardless how patients were managed in terms of the ACS, medically or through PCI, and also included in the elect PCI group.
Dr Carolyn Lam: Thank you for explaining that so well. Stephan, I would love for you to take us under the hood. What were the editors thinking when we saw this paper, why we're highlighting it now, and what do you think are the implications?
Dr Stefan James: The AUGUSTUS trial was unique in many aspects. I think Renato highlighted a few of them. As he told, there have been several similar trials without the other DOAX, factor 10A inhibitors and the dabigatran, but the AUGUSTUS trial was larger. It includes, as you mentioned previously, patients with ACS and medical management, and it also was designed as a two by two factorial design. So it actually asks two different questions and made two different randomizations, both anticoagulation with the two different agents, Warfarin versus Apixaban, but also Aspirin versus placebo, and so it's possible from this trial to understand more of the different aspects of treating patients, these complex patients with atrial fibrillation, NACS or PCI, and gave the study group and us an opportunity to better understand all these complexities. So with that, I'd like to turn to Renato and try to, with that background that I just outlaid, and you just try to make us understand what are the clinical implications of these aspects of the trial and the treatment of Apixaban and Aspirin in these patients?
Dr Renato Lopes: I think we were in the area that we desperately needed randomized data, because basically until five years ago, the standard of care of treating these patients was the classic triple therapy with Aspirin, Clopidogrel, and Warfarin, and this was based on no randomized trials and all observational data, and we know how problematic this is, and this field has evolved tremendously almost year after year since the PIONEER trial, since the RE-DUAL trial, and this year, we had AUGUSTUS and ENTRUST and I think now, as Mike Gibson used to say, that we have about 2.8 million different combination of antithrombotic strategies to treat these patients because we have different anticoagulants, different anti-platelets, different doses, different durations, different types of stents, which makes it really impossible for physicians or for any guidelines to contemplate all these options. So we really needed a few trials to at least try to give a few options that are evidence based and not just based on low quality of data, and I think now, if you look at the Augustus results, and the totality of the data from all these trials, which now is about almost 11,000 patients all together, actually almost 12,000 patients all together.
I think that what we know today is that yes, the initial period in hospital for some time it's important to use Aspirin. I think this is an important point to highlight, Stephan, that Aspirin still needs to be used for the acute treatment, and I would say at least for the first few initial days while patients are still in the hospital, but then by the time of discharge, which sometimes might be five days, six days, seven days, I think that now the totality of data show that it's reasonable to drop Aspirin for most patients.
So based on the AUGUSTUS results, what we show is that if you're going to use anticoagulation as Apixaban at the dose that is approved for stroke preventions in atrial fibrillation, combined with a P2Y12 inhibitor without Aspirin after the initial period, you have the best outcomes in terms of lower rates of bleeding, lower rates of hospitalizations, and we don't have to pay a cost in terms of ischemic events when we actually drop Aspirin and keep only the NOAC, in this case was Apixaban, plus a P2Y12 inhibitor, which most of the time was Clopidogrel, and here with AUGUSTUS, we basically show that this is true for patients with AFib and ACS, irrespective of the management with medical managing, with medical therapy, or with PCI. So I think that's an additional piece that that is true irrespective of how we're going to treat your ACS patient, or if the patient basically underwent elective PCI, and I think we learned today that the classic treatment therapy of VKA plus Aspirin plus P2Y12 inhibitor, so in other words, the triple classic triple therapy should generally be avoided.
Dr Stefan James: Thank you Renato. I think that that was a very complete answer in this complex arena. I'd like just to mention that of course the AUGUSTUS, as well as the other trials, have their limitations, as all trials. Although it was large, it was powered for safety, for bleeding events, and it was not powered for ischemic events. Having said that, we still want to look at ischemic events and clinical outcomes, and to what degree do you think we can do that? What conclusions can we draw from an ischemic point of view because of the fact that the trial was underpowered for that interpretation?
Dr Renato Lopes: That is a great question, Stephan, and in fact, if we look at events like stent thrombosis, they are very rare, and if you really want to attack a significant difference between Aspirin versus placebo in patients having stent thrombosis, we're really going to need a trial with about 30-40,000 people, which would be not feasible and not doable. So we need to be cautious when we analyze those events in the power trial for ischemic events. Nonetheless, there was a signal, if you look at all trials, and even in the meta-analysis that we published recently, that dropping Aspirin probably increased the risk of ischemic events, not in a statistically significant fashion, but nonetheless, this trend exists. The signal exists. So probably keeping Aspirin, add some protection for ischemic events, primarily stent thrombosis and myocardial infarction. The problem is a tradeoff. The problem is that the cost of adding aspirin is too high.
So now the question to us, Stephan, is to look further into our data and in the combined data sets that we're trying to work with the other authors and try to identify, okay, Aspirin really increased the risk of bleeding, but is there a group of patients who might benefit from a little bit longer Aspirin? So that's the first question. Who are those patients? May be complex PCI, maybe bifurcation lesions, maybe multiple lesions, multiple stents, and second, if we decide to give Aspirin longer, how much longer should we give? Because again, the cost is very high in terms of bad bleeds. So we are trying now to identify what is the trade off, and who most benefit from keeping Aspirin longer, and for how long in a way the cost might be worth it to pay in exchange of potentially save some ischemic events? And with that, we can further refine the treatment that I think I highlighted before. For most patients, I think what I said before is probably reasonable. We can drop Aspirin by the time of discharge after a few days, but for a few patients, for some patients, it might be wise to keep Aspirin a little bit longer, and we are trying now to identify first, who those patients are and second, form how much longer should we keep Aspirin, since the 40,000 patient trial is very unlikely to happen.
Dr Stefan James: I like his interpretation, Renato, although I wanted to highlight that there are limitations, I think this trial is extremely informant for clinicians. We learned a lot how to treat these very complex patients with complex treatments.
Dr Carolyn Lam: No, I couldn't have agreed more. I mean quoting Mike Gibson, 2.8 million combinations. Well, at least we've talked about some of them here and had a very clear take home message, although with the caveats that we were discussing. Thank you so much, Stefan and Renato. This was really a great discussion, and thank you audience for joining us today. You've been listening to Circulation on the Run. Don't forget to tune in again next week. This program is copyright American Heart Association 2019.