TIMI and GRACE Risk Scores Predict Both Short-Term and Long-Term Outcomes in Chinese Patients with Acute Myocardial Infarction.

BACKGROUND

Little is known about the long-term prognostic values of both thrombolysis in myocardial infarction (TIMI) and Global Registry of Acute Cardiac Events (GRACE) risk scores (RSs) to the Asian ethnicity. The purpose of this study is to compare the usefulness of these two scores in risk stratification and prediction of long-term (up to 3 years) outcomes for Chinese patients with myocardial infarction (MI).

METHODS

We calculated the TIMI and GRACE RSs for 726 consecutive patients with MI [55.6% with ST-segment elevation (STEMI) and 44.4% with non-ST-segment elevation (NSTEMI)].

RESULTS

Although the risk profile of our population (median TIMI score = 5 for STEMI, 4 for NSTEMI, and median GRACE score = 164) was higher, the in-hospital mortality (7.1% for NSTEMI and 6.7% for STEMI) was comparable to that predicted by GRACE RS. The GRACE RS worked well in predicting short-term and long-term death (C-statistics range 0.710 to 0.789) and triple (death, MI, and stroke) endpoints (C-statistics range 0.695 to 0.764) in both subsets of MI. GRACE RS performed significantly better than the TIMIRS in predicting 3-year mortality in NSTEMI (p = 0.035) and 1-year and 3-year mortality in STEMI (p = 0.028 and 0.009, respectively). Stratification by tertiles of GRACERS furnished greater prognostic information versus risk assessment by the TIMI RS.

CONCLUSIONS

The use of RSs revealed a fair to good discriminatory accuracy in predicting both short-term and long-term major adverse cardiac events in Asian patients with MI. Compared with the simpler TIMI RS, the GRACERS was more accurate in predicting long-term mortality.