TRENDS OF CORONARY ARTERY DISEASE IN KHYBER PAKHTUNKHWA, PAKISTAN: A RETROSPECTIVE STUDY

OBJECTIVE: To determine the frequency of new coronary artery disease (CAD) cases during the years 2015, 2016 and 2017 in patients presenting to a cardiology clinic and to look for its current trends in Khyber Pakhtunkhwa (KP), Pakistan.METHODS: This descriptive study was conducted in a private clinic of interventional cardiologist, based in Lady Reading Hospital, Peshawar, Pakistan from January to March 2018. We retrospectively analyzed the echocardiography data and review of clinical records from January 2015 to December 2017 and identified cases of incident CAD based on Regional Wall Motion Abnormalities on echo. SPSS V20.0 was used for analysis. We applied the unpaired t-test to look for an increasing trend in CAD between 2015-2016, 2016-2017 and 2015 through 2017.RESULTS: A total of 3865 patients of incident coronary artery disease were identified from January 2015 to December 2017. The number of incident CAD patients was 998 in 2015, 1362 in 2016 and 1505 in 2017. We applied the unpaired t-test on the number of post myocardial infarction patients for an increasing trend in 2015 vs 2016, 2016 vs 2017 and 2015 vs 2017 which showed a p-value of u003c0.001, 0.961 and u003c0.001 respectively.CONCLUSION: CAD is on the rise in KP over the past 3 years and attention needs to be paid to risk factor control and health education in addition to improvement in the health system to prevent this trend from getting out of control among the population of KP.