Frailty effects and euro score system evaluation in postoperative outcomes of cardiac surgery patients

Several scoring systems are available to evaluate the cardiac surgery risk. Frailty increases the risk of adverse outcomes after surgery. The Frailty evaluation system is a relatively new method, and in this study, we compared the frailty scoring method with the conventional Euroscore method.

This cross-sectional study was performed on 88 elderly patients (over 65 years of age) undergoing coronary artery bypass graft surgery in Seyed al Shohada Heart Center, Urmia, Iran, from October 2019 to March 2020. Patients undergoing other cardiac surgeries, patients with left main coronary artery involvement, patients with low-threshold chest pain, and life-threatening emergencies were excluded. At the preoperative period and based on the CAF (the Comprehensive Assessment of Frailty) Scoring System and the EuroScore system, the total score was calculated for each patient. Patients were followed up until one month after surgery in terms of morbidity and mortality. Patients' data were analyzed and the correlation between the total score of both systems and the postoperative consequences were statistically analyzed.

In this study, the mean age of patients was 70.84±5.07 (65-91) years and most of the patients were male, 65(73 9%).The mean ejection fraction of patients was 44.13±5%. Twelve patients (13.6%) had mild frailty (CAF score of 1 to 8), 74 patients (84.1%) had moderate frailty (CAF score of 9 to 18) and 2 patients (2.3%) had severe frailty (CAF score of 19 to 28). In the postoperative period, there were two cases of mortality (2.3%) and four cases of complications (4.55%). The mean serum creatinine level in dead patients was significantly higher than in discharged patients. We did not find any significant relationship between frailty CAF score and EuroSocre with postoperative complications. In a comparison of two methods for predicting surgery outcomes: the mean EuroScore in the two dead patients was significantly higher than discharged patients (8.11 vs 2.89 with p value=0.001).

EuroSocre evaluation was a better predictor of postoperative mortality and its measurement is easy.