Coronary heart disease, specifically myocardial infarction, represents the major risk factor for patients undergoing surgical repair of their abdominal aortic aneurysm.
About 75% of all patients in the series of 285 cases were without any signs or symptoms of coronary heart disease. Nevertheless, 21.8% of these patients required additional cardiologic screening in order to assess a possible suspected coronary heart disease, which made urgent coronary angiography necessary in 4.6% of all the patients. Furthermore, 7.3% of all the patients required percutaneous transluminal coronary angioplasty (9=3.15%) or coronary artery bypass grafting (12=4.2%) prior to their scheduled aneurysm operation.
Owing to this concept of careful preoperative assessment of adjacent coronary risk factors in patients with aortic aneurysms, the overall morbidity and mortality has dropped from 7.6% to 3.1% over the last ten years.
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