Functional Assessment in Elderly MI Patients With Multivessel Disease

Elderly patients presenting with myocardial infarction (MI) and multivessel disease are the highest risk population with the worst prognosis. No trial has ever been designed to optimize their outcome. The actual real-life standard of care is, in the best of the cases, culprit only revascularization. However, real-life registries show that outcome of MI elderly patients treated with this strategy is far from being optimal with at least a 15% rate of cardiac death or myocardial infarction at 1 year. To date, studies on this population have been focused on devices (bare metal stent vs biodegradable drug eluting stent) or on dual antiplatelet regimen (long vs short) and no study was focused on evaluating if complete revascularization is able to improve the prognosis in these patients. The contemporary complete revascularization is represented by a functionally-driven revascularization that recently showed to significantly reduce myocardial infarction rate and outperformed an angio-complete revascularization. Thus, our hypothesis is that a functionally-driven complete revascularization in elderly patients with MI and multivessel disease may improve prognosis compared to the actual standard of care in these patients, namely culprit only revascularization. Being a "strategy" trial, we identified the patient-oriented composite endpoint (POCE) as primary outcome of interest (all cause death, any MI, any stroke, any revascularization). Several pre-specified substudies have been planned. A detailed list of the substudies is available in the website of the trial (http://www.thefiretrial.com)