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.