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ince the initial publication of ''Guidelines for Reporting Morbidity and Mortality After Cardiac Valvular Operations'' in 1988, 1 followed by a revised version in 1996, 2 valvular heart surgery has evolved to include an enhanced understanding of patient-and disease-related factors affecting outcomes, increased numbers of valve repairs, more operations performed for patients with minimal symptoms, new prostheses, novel repair methods, and the emergence of percutaneous interventional (catheter-based) valve repair and replacement. To adapt to this changing environment, the Councils of the American Association for Thoracic Surgery, The Society of Thoracic Surgeons, and The European Association for Cardio-Thoracic Surgery have directed an Ad Hoc Liaison Committee for Standardizing Definitions of Prosthetic Heart Valve Morbidity to review current clinical practice to update and clarify these reporting guidelines. The guidelines are intended to cover treatment of all four cardiac valves in both adult and pediatric patients. Further, these guidelines apply uniformly, irrespective of whether the therapy was carried out as a conventional open operation, as a minimally invasive (video-assisted or robotic) surgical procedure, or with percutaneous interventional catheter techniques. PurposeThese reporting guidelines are intended to facilitate analysis and reporting of clinical results of various therapeutic approaches to diseased heart valves such that meaningful comparisons can be made and inferences drawn from investigations of medical, surgical, and percutaneous interventional treatment of patients with valvular heart disease. Early MortalityEarly mortality is to be reported as all-cause mortality at 30, 60, or 90 days and depicted by actuarial estimates (with number remaining at risk and confidence intervals [CIs]) or as simple percentages, regardless of the patient's location, be it home or in a health care facility.

BACKGROUND Questions persist concerning the comparative effectiveness of percutaneous coronary intervention (PCI) and coronary-artery bypass grafting (CABG). The American College of Cardiology Foundation (ACCF) and the Society of Thoracic Surgeons (STS) collaborated to compare the rates of long-term survival after PCI and CABG. METHODS We linked the ACCF National Cardiovascular Data Registry and the STS Adult Cardiac Surgery Database to claims data from the Centers for Medicare and Medicaid Services for the years 2004 through 2008. Outcomes were compared with the use of propensity scores and inverse-probability-weighting adjustment to reduce treatment-selection bias. RESULTS Among patients 65 years of age or older who had two-vessel or three-vessel coronary artery disease without acute myocardial infarction, 86,244 underwent CABG and 103,549 underwent PCI. The median follow-up period was 2.67 years. At 1 year, there was no significant difference in adjusted mortality between the groups (6.24% in the CABG group as compared with 6.55% in the PCI group; risk ratio, 0.95; 95% confidence interval [CI], 0.90 to 1.00). At 4 years, there was lower mortality with CABG than with PCI (16.4% vs. 20.8%; risk ratio, 0.79; 95% CI, 0.76 to 0.82). Similar results were noted in multiple subgroups and with the use of several different analytic methods. Residual confounding was assessed by means of a sensitivity analysis. CONCLUSIONS In this observational study, we found that, among older patients with multivessel coronary disease that did not require emergency treatment, there was a long-term survival advantage among patients who underwent CABG as compared with patients who underwent PCI. (Funded by the National Heart, Lung, and Blood Institute.)

Admission at the weekend is associated with increased risk of subsequent death within 30 days of admission. The likelihood of death actually occurring is less on a weekend day than on a mid-week day.