Prevalence and 30-day mortality of aortitis among Medicare beneficiaries undergoing unruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm repair

Prevalence and 30-day mortality of aortitis among Medicare beneficiaries undergoing unruptured abdominal aortic aneurysm repair

Background: The US News & World Report's Best Hospitals Procedures and Conditions ratings aim to assess hospital performance for routine inpatient care. Aortitis is a complicating factor for abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair, but aortitis diagnoses are not currently an exclusion cr...

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Bibliographic Details
Main Authors: Benjamin D. Pollock, PhD, MSPH, Razvan M. Chirila, MD, Annette M. Danks, MBA, Jennifer B. Cowart, MD
Format: Article
Language:English
Published: Elsevier 2025-01-01
Series:JVS-Vascular Insights
Subjects:
Aortitis
Aortic aneurysm
Mortality
Online Access:http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S2949912724001260
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Summary:Background: The US News & World Report's Best Hospitals Procedures and Conditions ratings aim to assess hospital performance for routine inpatient care. Aortitis is a complicating factor for abdominal aortic aneurysm (AAA) repair, but aortitis diagnoses are not currently an exclusion criteria for the AAA repair rating. We assessed 30-day mortality among patients with aortitis during AAA repair to determine whether aortitis should be an exclusion criterion. Methods: We used the Medicare Beneficiary Summary File and Inpatient Limited Data Sets from January 1, 2019, to December 1, 2022. We included all encounters for AAA repair with a diagnosis code for unruptured AAA. We excluded encounters with a diagnosis code for ruptured AAA. We calculated the prevalence of aortitis (defined using International Classification of Diseases, 10th edition, codes) in this population, and used log-linear regression to compare the age- and sex-adjusted risk of 30-day mortality in patients with aortitis vs those without aortitis. We reported the adjusted risk ratio and 95% confidence interval. Results: There were 51,508 AAA repair encounters. The prevalence of aortitis was 2.3% (1167/51,508); 30-day mortality occurred in 37/1167 (3.2%) encounters with an aortitis diagnosis vs 998/50,341 (2.0%) without aortitis (adjusted risk ratio, 1.50; 95% confidence interval,1.09-2.07; P = .01). Conclusions: AAA repair with concurrent aortitis should be excluded from quality outcome measures.
ISSN:2949-9127

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