A group of leading interventional cardiologists has launched an attack on the growing role of appropriate use criteria (AUC) for PCI in the US. They argue that severe flaws in current guidelines render unreliable current attempts to assess the rate of appropriate procedures.

In a paper published in  JACC: Cardiovascular Interventions, Steven Marso and colleagues (Paul Teirstein, Dean Kereiakes, Jeffrey Moses, John Lasala, and J Aaron Grantham) criticize a study in JAMA published last year from the National Cardiovascular Data Registry (NCDR) that found a large degree of inappropriate or uncertain PCI procedures, as well as a wide range of variability among institutions. Marso et al write that the JAMA paper sensationalized the data by focusing attention on the low rate of appropriate indications for nonacute PCI– 50.4%– while failing to point out that the study found that 84.6% of procedures in the entire study population– acute and nonacute alike– were deemed appropriate. Furthermore, given the imprecision built into the system, they ask: what is the “acceptable threshold” of inappropriate PCI?

The authors write that the AUC panel “purposefully limited involvement of the interventional community during the development process, in order to avoid having a majority of committee members “whose livelihood is tied to the technology under study.” But the under-representation of interventionists may have biased the results, they argue. One particular case as graded by the AUC panel was the most common reason for cases to be categorized as inappropriate: the AUC committee decided that PCI was inappropriate for a patient with 1- to 2-vessel disease, no proximal LAD involvement or prior CABG, class I or II symptoms, low-risk noninvasive findings, and on no or minimal medications. But most clinicians believe this is an uncertain but not inappropriate indication, they say.  The AUC panel may have “got this one wrong,” they write.
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