Effects of the COVID-19 pandemic on the population over 75 years old with coronary artery disease. The EPIC SIERRA 75 registry

Abstract

To the Editor, The negative impact of the SARS-CoV-2 pandemic on public health is due not only to the infection itself, but also to the effects of confinement and the negative impact of the population’s perceptions on the risks involved when visiting medical facilities for health reasons. Proof of this are the repeated observations of an obvious reduction in the number of patients treated of myocardial infarctions during the pandemic.1,2 It is highly plausible that what we saw with ischemic heart disease happened with other conditions as well whether cardiovascular or not. It is well known that older populations and patients with vascular risk factors and/or cardiovascular disease have been the ones most severely affected by the pandemic.3 In this study we evaluated the impact of the pandemic on the population of patients over 75 years of age with known coronary artery disease. For this purpose, a subgroup of all the patients recruited in the ongoing prospective EPIC SIERRA 75 registry published at ClinicalTrials.gov (identifier: NCT03567733) were included in this study. The EPIC SIERRA 75 is a prospective registry that included patients over 75 years with percutaneous revascularization of de novo coronary artery lesions using a new-generation drug-eluting stent. Those with cardiogenic shock...