Percutaneous coronary interventions have improved during the last decade with 15% rate of target vessel failure (TVF) at 5 years according to the latest reports. We are already familiar with the benefits of functional assessment of lesions with FFR and its clinical outcomes. Additionally, low post PCI FFR values (FFR ≤ 0.83-≤0.91) have been associated...
To evaluate borderline coronary lesions (a 40% to 70% obstruction), determining associated ischemia is paramount. For this purpose, pressure gradients are measured across the stenosis. These measurements can be hyperemic, such as the fractional flow reserve (FFR), or taken at rest, such as the instantaneous wave-free ratio (iFR). According to the iFR-SWEDEHEART 5-year follow-up outcomes,...
Current guidelines recommend using fractional flow reserve (FFR) to guide coronary angioplasty. However, intermediate FFR values (0.75-0.80) generate uncertainty about the prognostic value of performing coronary angioplasty over optimal medical treatment. The use of coronary flow reserve (CFR) together with FFR provides further insight into coronary circulation because CFR is an index that also includes...
Fractional flow reserve (FFR) has been shown effective and safe by different studies, yet not at 5 years. The aim of this multicenter registry was to assess the impact of thrombotic risk (as per CREDO-Kyoto score) as a predictor of cardiovascular events at 5 years in patients with deferred revascularization after FFR measurement. The score...
FLAVOUR was a prospective randomized non-inferiority study in patients with intermediate coronary lesions (40%-70%) that compared two imaging modalities: IVUS (intravascular imaging) and FFR (fractional flow reserve). According to this research—presented at ACC 2022—, FFR-guided angioplasty was non-inferior to IVUS-guided angioplasty at 2 years of follow-up. Furthermore, using FFR-based imaging led to fewer stent implantations....
Compared with visual estimation of lesions, using quantitative angiography-derived fractional flow reserve (quantitative flow ration, QFR) provides better clinical outcomes at one year for angioplasty. These results emerge from the Chinese FAVOR III study, presented at the 2021 TCT scientific sessions and simultaneously published in The Lancet. The simplicity and safety offered by QRF—since there is...
The 5-year followup of the iFR-SWEDEHEART has confirmed the safety and efficacy of using either FFR or iFR to guide PCI in intermediate lesions. The iFR-SWEDEHEART initial outcomes together with the DEFINE-FLAIR outcomes had started the debate around these two measuring strategies. The FFR requires adenosine, which results costly in addition to causing adverse events,...
The FLOWER-MI (presented simultaneously at ACC 2021 and NEJM) hit FFR hard. Its outcomes showed that STEMI patients presenting other non-culprit lesions did not benefit from FFR guided revascularization vs PCI. As it happens with most large studies with unexpected results in the general population, the sub-studies that follow select better samples and, as a...
The predecessor of this research—RIPCORD, published in 2014—showed that using fractional flow reserve (FFR) changes the treatment strategy in about 25% of patients. That marked the rise of FFR. In fact, the DEFER, FAME, and FAME 2 studies offered results consistent with the original RIPCORD. In this research, authors tested the hypothesis of systematic use of...
Functional assessment with fractional flow reserve (FFR) was not better than conventional angiography to guide complete revascularization in patients with multivessel lesions in a setting of ST-segment elevation myocardial infarction and successful primary angioplasty. These results were published in the New England Journal of Medicine (NEJM) and presented during the American College of Cardiology (ACC)...