Myocardial perfusion cardiovascular MRI is as good as invasive angiography and measurement of fractional flow reserve to guide revascularization in patients with angina, research suggests.
In the New England Journal of Medicine, researchers present the outcomes of an unblinded, multicenter, clinical effectiveness trial comparing the two revascularization strategies in 918 patients who had typical angina and either two or more cardiovascular risk factors or a positive exercise treadmill test.
In the fractional flow reserve method, revascularization was recommended in all vessels with an FFR of 0.8 or less. In the MRI-guided method, all patients underwent myocardial perfusion cardiovascular MRI, and patients with clinically significant inducible ischemia then underwent invasive angiography, and revascularization if required.
Significantly fewer patients in the cardiovascular MRI group underwent index revascularization, compared with the fractional flow reserve group (36% vs. 45% respectively; P = .005), and only 48% in the cardiovascular MRI group underwent invasive angiography, compared with 97% of patients in the fractional flow reserve arm.
However, there was no significant difference between the two groups in the incidence of major cardiac adverse events after 1 year, signifying that the MRI approach met the criteria for noninferiority.
There was also no significant difference between the two groups in the percentage of patients who were free from angina after 12 months (49.2% in the MRI group and 43.8% in the FFR group).
“Current guidelines on the management of the care of patients with suspected coronary artery disease separate diagnostic strategies from therapeutic strategies owing to a lack of evidence comparing combined diagnostic and therapeutic pathways,” wrote Eike Nagel, MD, of the Goethe University Frankfurt Institute for Experimental and Translational Cardiovascular Imaging and coauthors. “The MR-INFORM trial closes this knowledge gap by comparing two frequently used, well-defined, standardized, and validated clinical management strategies.”
However, they pointed out that one limitation of their study was the lack of a third group of patients who received medical therapy without planned revascularization. They also noted that the incidence of the primary outcome of major adverse cardiac events was lower than expected at 1 year.
The study was supported by the Guy’s and St. Thomas’ Biomedical Research Centre of the National Institute for Health Research. Three authors declared support from study supporters related to the study, three declared grants, personal fees, and other support from the private sector unrelated to the study. No other conflicts of interest were declared.
SOURCE: Nagel E et al. New Engl J Med. 2019;380:2418-28. doi: 10.1056/NEJMoa1716734.