Background: Acute myocardial infarction (AMI) and cancer are common and serious diseases. As the prognosis and treatment of both diseases has improved, more cancer patients will suffer an AMI. Unfortunately, data on these "double hit" patients is scarce.
Methods: From the largest public German health insurance, anonymized data of all patients with pre-existing cancer who were hospitalized due to ST-elevation MI (STEMI) between 2010 and 2017 were analyzed and followed-up until 2018.
Results: Of 175,262 STEMI patients, 27,213 had pre-existing cancer (15.5%). Most frequent were skin (24.9%), prostate (17.0%), colon (11.0%), breast (10.9%), urinary tract (10.6%), and lung cancer (5.2%). STEMI patients with malignancies were older and presented more often with coronary three-vessel disease, atrial arrhythmias, chronic kidney disease, chronic heart failure, cerebrovascular and peripheral artery disease (PAD, each p < 0.001). They showed more often previous AMI, percutaneous coronary interventions (PCI), cardiac surgery, and stroke (all p < 0.001). Acute PCIs were applied between 2 and 6% less frequently compared to those without cancer. In-hospital adverse events occurred more frequently in cancer. Eight-year survival was 57.3% (95% CI 57.0-57.7%) without cancer and ranged between 41.2% and 19.2% in distinct cancer types. Multivariable Cox regression for all-cause mortality found, e.g., lung cancer (HR 2.04), PAD stage 4-6 (HR 1.78), metastasis (HR 1.72), and previous stroke (HR 1.44) to have the strongest impact (all p < 0.001).
Conclusion: In this large "real world" data, prognosis after STEMI in cancer patients was markedly reduced but differed widely between cancer types. Of note, no withholding of interventional treatments in cancer patients could be observed.
Keywords: STEMI; cancer disease; co-morbidities; health service research; mortality.