Quality of Life One Year after Coronary Artery Bypass Graft Surgery

BACKGROUND Coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) is a treatment strategy to relieve the symptoms of coronary artery disease (CAD). Based on determining the long term outcome of CABG using SF-36 Health Related Quality Of Life (HRQOL) questionnaire, the present study was conducted in our center to determine the CABG results one-year after the operation. METHODS Between March 2005 and August 2009, 112 patients with coronary heart disease (CHD) who underwent coronary artery bypass graft (CABG) were enrolled. Patients completed SF-36 HRQOL general health status questionnaire. Stepwise multiple linear regression models were used to detect independent variables predicting changes in each eight subscales of SF-36 questionnaire. RESULTS The mean age of patients was 61.4±0.9 years and most of them were male with three vessel diseases that were on pump CABG. The mean physical and mental component summary scores were 59.5±0.9 and 60.2±0.9, respectively. Physical functioning (PF) and role physical (RP) improved in males. Regression models showed that there were some statistical models with low R-square to predict role emotional (RE), general health (GH), PF and RP according to ejection fraction after surgery, diabetes, pump type of CABG and male gender. CONCLUSION CABG has led to higher and more satisfactory outcomes for PF, RP and RE but lower in other scales comparing with normative data of the society and one-year post-operative scores of other studies. It could mostly be attributed to unmodified risk factors and progression of existing comorbidities.