Ankle Brachial Index as a Predictor of Coronary Artery Disease Complexity

Abstract

A therosclerosis is a widespread, chronic progressive disease that mainly involves medium-sized arteries. It affects coronaries, cerebral arteries and peripheral arteries with the same risk factors. A well-known relation exists between PAD and CAD. Many studies reported relation between ABI and complexity of CAD. The aim of our study was to investigate the relation between ABI as a marker for PAD and SYNTAX score as a marker for CAD complexity. This study included 152 patients without known PAD who were referred for elective coronary angiography at Ain Shams University hospitals in the time period from July 2015 till December 2015. Patients were subjected to thorough history taking, physical examination and laboratory investigations. They all had their ABI measured before coronary angiography, then SYNTAX score was calculated for every patient after coronary angiography using online calculator. Our study has found a strong negative correlation between ABI and SYNTAX score, concluding that ABI might be used as an independent predictor of CAD complexity (P-value 0.0001). Moreover we found a correlation between ABI and age, the more the age the less the ABI (P 0.0001), also ABI was found to correlate with smoking (P 0.022). This study has also found a correlation between SYNTAX score and smoking (P 0.024). SYNTAX score was higher in males (P 0.009).