Clinical and Echocardiographic Outcomes Following Permanent Pacemaker Implantation After Transcatheter Aortic Valve Replacement

Background— Transcatheter aortic valve replacement has become the procedure of choice for inoperable, high-risk, and many intermediate-risk patients with aortic stenosis. Conduction abnormalities are a common finding after transcatheter aortic valve replacement and often result in permanent pacemaker (PPM) implantation. Data pertaining to the clinical impact of PPM implantation are controversial. We used meta-analysis techniques to summarize the effect of PPM implantation on clinical and echocardiographic outcomes after transcatheter aortic valve replacement. Methods and Results— Data were summarized as Mantel–Haenszel relative risk (RR) and 95% confidence intervals (CIs) for dichotomous variables and as standardized mean difference and 95% CI for continuous variables We used the HigginsI 2 statistic to evaluate heterogeneity. We found that patients with and without PPM have similar all-cause mortality (RR, 0.85; 95% CI, 0.70–1.03), cardiovascular mortality (RR, 0.84; 95% CI, 0.59–1.18), myocardial infarction (RR, 0.47; 95% CI, 0.20–1.11), and stroke (RR, 1.26; 95% CI, 0.70–2.26) at 30 days. The groups were also comparable in all-cause mortality (RR, 1.03; 95% CI, 0.92–1.16), cardiovascular mortality (RR, 0.69; 95% CI, 0.39–1.24), myocardial infarction (RR, 0.58; 95% CI, 0.30–1.13), and stroke (RR, 0.70; 95% CI, 0.47–1.04) at 1 year. We observed that the improvement in left ventricular ejection fraction was significantly greater in the patients without PPM (standardized mean difference, 0.22; 95% CI, 0.12–0.32).Conclusions— PPM implantation is not associated with increased risk of all-cause mortality, cardiovascular mortality, stroke, or myocardial infarction both at short- and long-term follow-up. However, PPM is associated with impaired left ventricular ejection fraction recovery post-transcatheter aortic valve replacement.