The prognostic impact of diastolic dysfunction after transcatheter aortic valve replacement: A systematic review and meta-analysis.

Background: Diastolic dysfunction (DD) is a long-established marker of disease progression in patients with aortic valve stenosis (AS), indicating valvular myocardial damage. Recently, substantial observational data have emerged demonstrating that worse pre-operative DD assessed using echocardiography is associated with adverse long-term clinical outcomes after transcatheter aortic valve replacement (TAVR).

Aim: To systematically appraise and quantitatively synthesize current evidence on the prognostic impact of echocardiographic severe DD derived by echocardiography before TAVR.

Methods: A systemic literature review was undertaken in electronic databases to identify studies reporting the predictive value of severe DD in AS subjects undergoing TAVR. A random-effects meta-analysis was conducted to quantify the adjusted and unadjusted hazard ratios (HRs) for all-cause mortality and major adverse cardiovascular events (MACEs) for the presence of severe DD.

Results: Ten studies were deemed eligible for inclusion. Of those, 9 provided appropriate quantitative data for the meta-analysis, encompassing a total of 4,619 patients. The presence of severe DD was associated with increased risk for all-cause mortality (pooled unadjusted HR=2.56 [1.46-4.48]; p<0.01; I=76 %) and MACEs (pooled unadjusted HR=1.82 [1.29-2.58]; p<0.01; I=86 %). When adjusted for clinically-relevant parameters, the presence of severe DD retained independent association with all-cause mortality (pooled adjusted HR=2.35 [1.26-4.37]; p<0.01; I=79 %) and MACEs (pooled adjusted HR= 2.52 [1.72-3.65]; p<0.01; I=0 %). In subgroup analysis there was no difference on post-TAVR risk between the use of different diastolic function grading scores.

Conclusion: Presence of severe DD assessed by echocardiography pre-TAVR is a major determinant of long-term adverse outcomes after the procedure.