The American journal of cardiology
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The percentage of patients with primary percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) with door-to-balloon (D2B) times ≤90 minutes is used as a hospital performance measure for public reporting. Patients can be excluded from reporting for nonsystem-related delays. How exclusions impact D2B time reporting at the hospital level is unknown. ⋯ If a criterion of having ≥90% of patients with D2B ≤90 minutes was used, excluding patients with nonsystem delays significantly increased the proportion of patients meeting this goal for each group: low, 28% to 37%; intermediate, 17.7% to 37.5%; and high, 14% to 52% (all p <0.01). In conclusion, the proportion of patients excluded from D2B reporting varies substantially among hospitals. This has a greater impact on percentage of patients with D2B time ≤90 minutes than on median D2B times.
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Observational Study
Effect of statin therapy on mortality in patients with infective endocarditis.
The aim of our study was to determine whether pre-emptive statin therapy was associated with improved outcome of infective endocarditis (IE). We conducted a nationwide, population-based, propensity score-matched cohort study with the Taiwan's National Health Insurance Research Database. All patients with IE between January 2000 and December 2010 were enrolled. ⋯ The reduction in mortality from IE remained significant for follow-up 3 months (aHR 0.68, 95% CI, 0.53-0.88), 6 months (aHR 0.73, 95% CI, 0.58-0.91), and 12 months (aHR 0.68, 95% CI, 0.55-0.84). Statin therapy was associated with a reduced risk of ICU admission rates, shock events, the need for mechanical ventilation, but not significantly with the need for heart valvular replacement surgery. In conclusion, our study found that statin therapy is associated with a reduced risk of in-hospital and subsequent mortality of IE.