• Hong-Seok Lim, Pim A L Tonino, Bernard De Bruyne, Andy S C Yong, Bong-Ki Lee, Nico H J Pijls, and William F Fearon.
• Division of Cardiovascular Medicine, Stanford University Medical Center, Stanford, CA, United States; Department of Cardiology, Ajou University School of Medicine, Suwon, Republic of Korea.
• Int. J. Cardiol. 2014 Nov 15;177(1):66-70.

BackgroundFractional flow reserve (FFR)-guided percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) improved outcomes compared with an angiography-guided strategy in patients with multivessel coronary artery disease (CAD). However, the effect of age on FFR has not been well-studied. We aimed to evaluate the impact of age on the favorable results of routine FFR-guided PCI for multivessel CAD.MethodsWe compared 1 year outcomes between FFR-guided PCI and angiography-guided PCI in the 512 patients enrolled in the FAME study <65 years old compared to the 493 patients ≥ 65 years old. We also evaluated the effect of age on the FFR result of varying degrees of visually estimated coronary stenosis.ResultsThe 1-year rate of death, myocardial infarction or repeat revascularization in the angiography-guided group tended to be higher than in the FFR-guided group for both those patients <65 (17.2% vs. 12.0%, P = 0.098) and those ≥ 65 years old (19.7% vs. 14.3%, P = 0.111) with no significant interaction based on age (P = 0.920). Older patients had higher FFR in vessels with 50% to 70% stenosis (0.83 ± 0.11 vs. 0.80 ± 0.13, P = 0.028) and in vessels with 71% to 90% stenosis (0.69 ± 0.15 vs. 0.65 ± 0.16, P = 0.002). The proportion of functionally significant lesions (FFR ≤ 0.80) in vessels with 71% to 90% stenosis was significantly lower in elderly compared to younger patients (75.3% vs. 84.1%, P = 0.013).ConclusionsFFR-guided PCI is beneficial regardless of age, however, older patients have fewer functionally significant lesions, despite a similar angiographic appearance.Copyright © 2014 Elsevier Ireland Ltd. All rights reserved.

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