COMPASS criteria applied to a contemporary cohort of unselected patients with stable coronary artery diseases: insights from the START registry.

Aims: Recently, the cardiovascular outcomes for people using anticoagulation strategies (COMPASS) trial demonstrated that dual therapy reduced cardiovascular outcomes compared with aspirin alone in patients with stable atherosclerotic disease.

Methods And Results: We sought to assess the proportion of patients eligible for the COMPASS trial and to compare the epidemiology and outcome of these patients with those without COMPASS inclusion or with any exclusion criteria in a contemporary, nationwide cohort of patients with stable coronary artery disease. Among the 4068 patients with detailed information allowing evaluation of eligibility, 1416 (34.8%) did not fulfil the inclusion criteria (COMPASS-Not-Included), 841 (20.7%) had exclusion criteria (COMPASS-Excluded), and the remaining 1811 (44.5%) were classified as COMPASS-Like. At 1 year, the incidence of major adverse cardiovascular event (MACE), a composite of cardiovascular death, myocardial infarction, and stroke, was 0.9% in the COMPASS-Not-Included and 2.0% in the COMPASS-Like (P = 0.01), and 5.0% in the COMPASS-Excluded group (P < 0.0001 for all comparisons). Among the COMPASS-Like population, patients with multiple COMPASS enrichment criteria presented a significant increase in the risk of MACE (from 1.0% to 3.3% in those with 1 and ≥3 criteria, respectively; P = 0.012), and a modest absolute increase in major bleeding risk (from 0.2% to 0.4%, respectively; P = 0.46).

Conclusion: In a contemporary real-world cohort registry of stable coronary artery disease, most patients resulted as eligible for the COMPASS. These patients presented a considerable annual risk of MACE that consistently increases in the presence of multiple risk factors.