Background: Recently developments were achieved in the treatment of malignancies, increasing the longevity of patients with malignant diseases. Cardiovascular diseases and cancer share similar risk factors. We sough to evaluate the effect of a history of malignancy in a large cohort of consecutive patients admitted to ICCU for acute cardiovascular event.
Methods: The study comprised 1000 consecutive patients who were admitted to ICCU during 2014. We have recorded their admission causes, basic characteristics, treatments and in-hospital outcome.
Results: 94 (9.4%) patients had a diagnosis of malignancy of them 68 (72%) patients had solid (mainly breast and prostate cancer) and 26 (28%) had hematogenous cancer. In 16 patients diagnosis of malignancy was made 0-6 months, in 15 patients 6-24 months before the qualifying hospitalization and 63 had remote (>2 years) diagnosis. Patients with a history of malignancy were older (72±13 vs. 65±15, p<0.01), more likely to be female (p=0.024), anemic (p=0.014) and to sustain pulmonary hypertension (p=0.03). Other risk factors including diabetes and smoking as well as co-morbidities such as COPD, CVA, renal failure or were similar. There were also no differences in therapeutic interventions between the two study groups, as well as in clinical outcome including in major bleedings (4.3% vs. 2.9%, p=0.15); acute renal failure (12% vs. 9.8%, p=0.6) or mortality (1% vs. 2.2%, p=0.46). Similarly when only patients admitted for ACS (N=610) were considered, a history of malignancy was associated with pulmonary hypertension (p<0.04) and anemia (p=0.086).
Conclusion: Patients with a diagnosis of malignancy compose about 10% of both the entire ICCU population as well as of the cohort of ACS. They were older, more likely to be female and anemic. Otherwise there were no significant differences in patient management or outcome regardless of the existence of history of malignancy.
