Retracted: Relation of atherosclerotic cardiovascular events to progression of aortic stenosis in older men.

Background: RETRACTION: Publication of the following article is being retracted by the publisher due to erroneous publication. The authors were unable to obtain internal review board permission to publish the work and requested withdrawal after acceptance of: "Relation of Atherosclerotic Cardiovascular Events to Progression of Aortic Stenosis in Older Men" by Masoor Kamalesh, Charlotte Ng, and George Eckert. This article published on EarlyView on December 14, 2009 (DOI: 10.1002/clc.20541. Aortic stenosis (AS) is now considered to be an active disease like atherosclerosis. However, therapies such as statins have not shown benefit in AS patients when studied prospectively.

Hypothesis: We tested the hypothesis that if AS was indeed similar to atherosclerosis, then subjects with progressive AS should have a higher atherosclerosis related event rate than those without progression of AS.

Methods: Two readers independently measured the aortic valve area using a continuity equation in 164 consecutive subjects with AS between January 1997 through March 2005, referred to our laboratory for serial echocardiograms for AS. Subjects with no progression of AS were compared to subjects with progression of reduction in valve area with regards to baseline demographics, occurrence of all myocardial infarctions, stroke, unstable angina requiring hospitalization, and coronary revascularization. A χ test were use to compare the groups for differences in endpoints.

Results: The study cohort included 164 males age 70 ± 9 years. Age, low‐density lipoprotein level, hypertension, or diabetes status were similar among the 2 groups, while the no progression group had more smokers and fewer patients on statins (<.05). Aortic stenosis progressed in 99 subjects (60% of total) during mean follow‐up of 2.5 years. A total of 28 patients had cardiovascular events (9 myocardial infarctions, 1 stroke, 20 coronary revascularizations, 5 unstable angina requiring hospitalization). Of these, 8 (12%) occurred in the no progression group and 20 (20%) occurred in the progression group ( = .16).

Conclusions: Progressive AS is not paralleled with increased occurrence of atherosclerotic cardiovascular events despite described similarities in risk factors for AS and atherosclerosis. Copyright © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.