According to a new article in the American Journal of Roentgenology (AJR), cardiac CTA-derived left atrium emptying fraction (LAEF) improves predictive performance of established clinical risk scores and may be used to assess patients’ risk during pre-transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR) workup and postprocedural surveillance.
“LAEF derived from preprocedural cardiac CTA independently predicts mortality in patients with severe aortic stenosis undergoing TAVR,” concluded corresponding author U. Joseph Schoepf from the Medical University of South Carolina’s Heart and Vascular Center.
Schoepf and colleagues’ retrospective single-center study included 175 patients with severe aortic stenosis (92 male, 83 female; median age, 79 years) who underwent cardiac CTA for clinical pre-TAVR assessment. Maximum and minimum left atrium volumes were calculated using biplane area-length measurements, and the values were indexed to body surface area: LAVImax and LAVImin, respectively.
In their sample, a reduced LAEF independently predicted all-cause mortality within 24 months post-procedure (hazard ratio 0.97 [0.94–0.99]; p=.02). Moreover, when incorporating LAEF, the c-index of the Society of Thoracic Surgeons Predicted Risk of Mortality significantly increased from 0.64 to 0.70.
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