Impact of pullback pressure gradient on clinical outcomes after percutaneous coronary interventions

Impaired flow following percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) is a known predictor of adverse outcomes. The pullback pressure gradient (PPG) is a novel physiological metric that differentiates focal from diffuse disease and enables prediction of post-PCI fractional flow reserve (FFR). This post-hoc analysis of the PPG Global study aimed to evaluate the prognostic performance of a PPG model for predicting post-PCI FFR and to determine whether the predicted physiological outcome is associated with adverse events following PCI.

Prospective and multicenter study including patients with hemodynamically significant coronary artery disease (CAD) undergoing PCI. A prediction model based on FFR and PPG was used to estimate post-PCI FFR. Based on the predicted values, vessels were classified as having either optimal or suboptimal post-PCI physiology. The primary endpoint was target vessel failure (TVF) at 1 year. TVF was defined as a composite of cardiac death, target-vessel myocardial infarction (MI), and ischemia-driven target vessel revascularization.

A total of 855 patients (890 vessels) were analyzed. The mean difference between predicted and measured post-PCI FFR was 0.001 (limits of agreement –0.10 to 0.10). There was a strong correlation between predicted and measured delta FFR (r = 0.92; 95% CI: 0.91–0.93; p < 0.001). Vessels with predicted suboptimal post-PCI physiology had a significantly higher incidence of TVF (adjusted hazard ratio [HR]: 1.97; 95% CI: 1.24–3.15; p = 0.004). Predicted suboptimal physiology was independently associated with adverse clinical outcomes.

PPG-predicted post-PCI physiology was associated with TVF at one year. These findings extend the role of coronary physiology beyond diagnostic assessment to include risk stratification and outcome prediction following PCI.

Graphical abstract